LOS ANGELES (AP) — Ingrid Lindblad took a share of the lead into the weekend at El Caballero Country Club in only the fourth start of her rookie season on the LPGA Tour.
Lindblad shot a career-best 9-under 63 in cool conditions Friday afternoon to join Ashleigh Buhai atop the leaderboard at 13-under 131 in the JM Eagle LA Championship.
“I feel like if you put the work in, like eventually it’s going to show up,” said Lindblad, the 25-year-old former LSU star from Sweden. “Obviously, it’s hard to tell exactly when it’s going to show up, but, obviously, I feel like I’ve been working on good things in my golf game that I need to get better at. After a day like this, it shows that it paid off.”
With the temperature only climbing into the low 60s on an overcast day, Lindblad had 10 birdies and a bogey on the first 14 holes. She parred the final four.
“I thought I read the greens really well,” Lindblad said. “It wasn’t just like tap-ins for par. It was 10-footers, 17-footers. I read the greens really well. Thought I had good speed on the greens. Really just one putt that ran away from me and I three-putted it.”
Buhai had a share of the lead for the second straight day after opening with a 63 to match Yan Liu. The 35-year-old South African player parred the final five holes Friday in a 68. She won the 2022 Women’s British Open for the first of her two LPGA Tour victories.
Minjee Lee was 12 under after a 65 in the morning. She won the 2019 tournament at Wilshire Country Club.
“I think just being in the right spot off the tee and, obviously, just hitting good iron shots into the greens,” Lee said. “Some of the greens are a little bit bigger, there are bigger landing spots.”
The tournament is being played at El Caballero because of renovations at Wilshire. It will return to Wilshire next season.
Liu had a 70 to drop into a tie for fourth at 11 under with Lauren Coughlin (67) and Miyu Yamashita (65).
Top-ranked Nelly Korda was 9 under after a 68 in her final start before her title defense next week in Houston in the major Chevron Championship.
“In the middle of the front nine just had a little bit after hiccup with kind of a silly double and a bogey to back it up," Korda said. “So, fought my way back to even through nine and kind of played some solid golf on the back nine.”
Second-ranked Jeeno Thitikul also was 9 under, shooting 67.
Two-time defending champion Hannah Green was 8 under after a 67.
Asterisk Talley, the 16-year-old Californian playing on a sponsor exemption missed the cut by a stroke, shooting 69-72. The recent runner-up at the Augusta National Women’s Amateur, she was second last year at El Caballero in the U.S. Girls Junior.
AP golf: https://apnews.com/hub/golf
Nelly Korda watches her shot from the 12th fairway during the first round of the LPGA's JM Eagle LA Championship golf tournament at El Caballero Country Club Thursday, April 17, 2025, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/William Liang)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been thrown into two top national security jobs at once as President Donald Trump presses forward with his top-to-bottom revamp of U.S. foreign policy, upending not only longstanding policies that the former Florida senator once supported but also the configuration of the executive branch.
Trump's appointment of Rubio to temporarily replace Mike Waltz as national security adviser is the first major leadership shake-up of the nascent administration, but Waltz's removal had been rumored for weeks — ever since he created a Signal group chat and accidentally added a journalist to the conversation where top national security officials shared sensitive military plans.
So, just over 100 days into his tenure as America’s top diplomat, Rubio now becomes just the second person to hold both positions. He follows only the late Henry Kissinger, who served as both secretary of state and national security adviser for two years under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford in the 1970s.
Rubio — a one-time Trump rival and hawkish conservative who was derided by the president as “Little Marco” during the 2016 presidential campaign — has proven adept at aligning himself with Trump’s “America First” foreign policy positions. Rubio has largely eschewed his staunch advocacy of providing foreign aid and promoting democracy overseas since taking over the State Department, repeating a refrain that every policy or program should make America safer, stronger or more prosperous.
Since being confirmed in a 99-0 Senate floor vote, Rubio has presided over a radical reorganization of the State Department. That includes the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development and plans to cut U.S. jobs by 15% while closing or consolidating more than 100 bureaus worldwide. He has also begun a major cull of the visa system, revoking hundreds, if not thousands, of visas issued to foreign students.
He has overseen the negotiation of agreements to send immigrants accused of crimes to third countries, most notably to El Salvador, in cases that are now being challenged in federal courts.
“Marco Rubio, unbelievable," Trump said Thursday before announcing on social media that Waltz would be nominated as ambassador to the United Nations and Rubio would take over as national security adviser in the interim. "When I have a problem, I call up Marco, he gets it solved.”
That's a far cry from 2016, when Rubio and Trump were competing for the GOP presidential nomination and Rubio warned that Trump was a threat. After Trump won, the relationship remained contentious, but eight years later, Rubio was an enthusiastic Trump supporter who worked his Florida bona fides to get into the president's inner circle.
Yet, even after Rubio was nominated to the top diplomatic job, doubts remained. Many pundits suggested he would last only a short time in office before Trump dismissed him in the same way he did his first-term secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, who was fired by tweet in 2018 just 18 months into the job.
Yet Rubio has been resilient. And as of Thursday, he oversees both the State Department and the National Security Council, which is responsible for coordinating all executive branch foreign policy functions, ranging from diplomatic to military and intelligence operations.
Thomas Wright, an NSC official during the Biden administration who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said the national security adviser post alone is “more than a full-time job.”
“It is just very hard to comprehend the idea that you can do this job sort of part time,” Wright said.
He said he watched national security adviser Jake Sullivan and his deputy work 14-15 hour days, six to seven days a week: “I think they felt that they had to do that to do the job properly.”
Appearing Thursday night on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity," Rubio was not asked to weigh in on the president’s decision to tap him as national security adviser but did joke that he was barred from adding pope to his list of many jobs because he is married.
But as he marked the first 100 days of Trump's latest term, Rubio applauded the president for his vision.
“I am honored by the trust President Trump placed in me and I am proud of the work the Department of State has done over the past hundred days to implement his agenda and put the American people first,” he wrote Wednesday in a State Department Substack post.
One of Rubio’s former Florida statehouse colleagues, Dan Gelber, a Democrat, said of Rubio's increasing responsibilities that "Marco is probably, to a certain extent, one of the more reliable Cabinet officers, if not the most reliable."
“And I can only believe those qualities are even more vital to his current confluence of positions and growing portfolio,” Gelber said. "He’s not a chaos guy, and I’ve always sort of wondered how he’s going to do in an administration where there seems to be so much chaos. And maybe that’s why he’s getting all these positions.”
Rubio's dual-hatted role comes on top of him serving as acting administrator of the largely shut down USAID and as acting head of the National Archives. It puts him in a similar position to that of Trump's longtime personal friend and golfing buddy Steve Witkoff.
As a special envoy, Witkoff is the lead U.S. negotiator in the Iran nuclear talks and in administration peace efforts for the Israel-Hamas war and the Ukraine-Russia war.
In many ways, Rubio and Witkoff are following in the footsteps of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who had multiple roles in the first administration, ranging from the Middle East to Latin America and immigration.
State Department officials appeared taken aback by Trump's appointment of Rubio as acting national security adviser. Spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said at a briefing Thursday that she learned the news from a journalist who asked her a question about Trump's post minutes after it appeared on social media.
Officials, however, have noted that Rubio in recent weeks has spent an increasingly large amount of time at the White House away from his posh seventh-floor State Department office in what is known as “Mahogany Row,” a corridor known for its wood paneling.
At the same time, these officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the personnel shift, said they did not expect Rubio's duties as secretary of state to change significantly. He still plans to travel on diplomatic missions abroad and likely will delegate at least some of the NSC management to others, they said.
Amiri reported from the United Nations.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, right, stands with French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot at the State Department, Thursday, May 1, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Secretary of State Marco Rubio attends a National Day of Prayer event in the Rose Garden of the White House, Thursday, May 1, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks during a cabinet meeting at the White House, Wednesday, April 30, 2025, in Washington, as President Donald Trump look on. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
