China and Golf: Today's news for April 3rd

CNN:

Trump: US will act unilaterally on North Korea if necessary

US President Donald Trump has declared he would be willing to go it alone to restrain North Korea's nuclear weapons program should China fail to change the situation, saying if Beijing won't help solve it, then "we will" alone.

"China will either decide to help us with North Korea or they won't," Trump said in an interview published Sunday in the Financial Times. "If they do, that will be very good for China, and if they don't, it won't be good for anyone."

Trump's administration has repeatedly emphasized its high concern over the North Korean nuclear threat. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited China last month to press North Korea's neighbor for help in mitigating that threat, and Trump is scheduled to host Chinese President Xi Jinping this week in the US, where he intends to bring the issue up.

It is always difficult to tell whether Trump's bluster is real or not. However, he is correct in looking at China to fix North Korea.

In other Trump news...

CNN:

Trump hits the links with Rand Paul, talks health care, W.H. says

 As President Donald Trump continues to pillory House conservatives who derailed efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare, he took a different tack Sunday with one of the Republican senators who had been loudly egging them on, inviting Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul to play golf at one of his eponymous courses.

White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham confirmed that Trump was playing golf with Paul as well as White House budget director Mick Mulvaney at Trump National Golf Club in Potomac Falls, Virginia.

...After the game was through, Paul told reporters he continued to be "very optimistic" about an agreement on repealing Obamacare, saying a deal was getting "closer and closer" and tweeting out the same.

I had a great time today with @realDonaldTrump and believe we are getting closer to an agreement on health care!

— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) April 2, 2017

This is what Trump should have done in the first place. Rand is the only Republican with a feasible health care plan that could actually work.

Finally, in other news...

AJC.com:

Atlanta traffic horror: Crews razing fallen highway overpass

As crews rushed to clear debris from a major Atlanta interstate span that collapsed in a raging fire, commuters in the Southeast's largest city braced for the first full workweek without the key link to some of the city's biggest suburbs.

Officials pledged after Thursday's collapse of a 350-foot section of Interstate 85 that a replace bridge would be built as soon as possible. But crews were working around the clock again Sunday to finish removing scorched debris from the collapsed northbound span and removing the southbound span weakened by the blaze.

After that, a replacement bridge could take months to build.

But here is the real news:

The fire was started by a man smoking crack under the bridge in an area north of downtown Atlanta where the state of Georgia stores noncombustible, construction materials, authorities said. It rapidly grew with smoke billowing high above the city's skyline. It didn't take long before chunks of concrete weakened by the high heat began flying off the bridge, leaving firefighters to scramble away for safety. No one was injured.

Either somebody at the AJC or the state of Georgia needs to revisit the definition of the word "noncombustible". It means "not flammable.". It means it cannot catch fire. The presence of a fire hot enough to collapse a bridge tells you all you need to know about the "noncombustible" nature of whatever the state was storing there. Whoever thought that stuff was "noncombustible" was on the same crack as the guy who started the fire.