No positive end in sight for Brexit impasse as deadline nears

On Tuesday, the House of Commons, the lower house of Britain's Parliament, rejected the Brexit deal Prime Minister Theresa May had reached with the European Union by 432 to 202 votes, a staggering margin of 230 votes, the highest in Britain's parliamentary history.

Claiming the vote would have a bearing on the fortunes of the United Kingdom in the decades to come, many British media outlets consider May's crushing defeat as an unprecedented disaster for a government in modern times while others view it as the strongest opposition to a government plan since the end of World War II.

Although the outcome was widely expected, and perhaps even May knew what lay in store for her in Parliament before the vote, very few expected the margin of defeat to be so big. In a desperate bid to win more votes, she had even deferred the vote, originally scheduled for Dec 11, by more than one month and worked nonstop to make the Brexit deal more acceptable to parliamentarians, but to no avail. And just before the vote on Tuesday, government officials said they expected the defeat margin to be within 100, only to get a slap in the face hours later.