U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth salutes during a ceremony at the US cemetery to commemorate the 81st anniversary of the D-Day landings, Friday, June 6, 2025 in Colleville-sur-Mer, Normandy. (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon was scrambling Monday to establish rules to guide U.S. Marines who could be faced with the rare and difficult prospect of using force against citizens on American soil, now that the Trump administration is deploying active duty troops to the immigration raid protests in Los Angeles.

U.S. Northern Command said it is sending 700 Marines into the Los Angeles area to protect federal property and personnel, including federal immigration agents. The 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines are coming from Twentynine Palms, California, and will augment about 4,100 National Guard members already in LA or authorized to be deployed there to respond to the protests.

The forces have been trained in deescalation, crowd control and standing rules for the use of force, Northern Command said.

But the use of the active duty forces still raises difficult questions.

The Marines are highly trained in combat and crisis response, with time in conflict zones like Syria and Afghanistan. But that is starkly different from the role they will face now: They could potentially be hit by protesters carrying gas canisters and have to quickly decide how to respond or face decisions about protecting an immigration enforcement agent from crowds.

According to a U.S. official, troops will be armed with their normal service weapons but will not be carrying tear gas. They also will have protective equipment such as helmets, shields and gas masks.

When troops are overseas, how they can respond to threats is outlined by the rules of engagement. At home, they are guided by standing rules for the use of force, which have to be set and agreed to by Northern Command, and then each Marine should receive a card explaining what they can and cannot do, another U.S. official said.

For example, warning shots would be prohibited, according to use-of-force draft documents viewed by The Associated Press. Marines are directed to deescalate a situation whenever possible but also are authorized to act in self-defense, the documents say.

The AP reviewed documents and interviewed nine U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details not yet public, about the guidance being determined for the Marines.

The Pentagon also is working on a memo with clarifying language for the Marines that will lay out the steps they can take to protect federal personnel and property. Those guidelines also will include specifics on the possibility that they could temporarily detain civilians if troops are under assault or to prevent harm, the first U.S. official said.

Those measures could involve detaining civilians until they can be turned over to law enforcement.

Having the Marines deploy to protect federal buildings allows them to be used without invoking the Insurrection Act, one U.S. official said.

The Insurrection Act allows the president to direct federal troops to conduct law enforcement functions in national emergencies. But the use of that act is extremely rare. Officials said that has not yet been done in this case and that it’s not clear it will be done.

President George H.W. Bush used the Insurrection Act to respond to riots in Los Angeles in 1992 after the acquittal of white police officers who were videotaped beating Black motorist Rodney King.

If their role expands if the violence escalates, it is not clear under what legal authority they would be able to engage, said Elizabeth Goitein, a senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law.

“If in fact those Marines are laying hands on civilians, doing searches, then you have pretty powerful legal concerns,” Goitein said. “No statutory authority Trump has invoked so far permits this.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth tweeted late Saturday that he was considering deploying the Marines to respond to the unrest after getting advice earlier in the day from Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to one of the U.S. officials.

Still, the tweet, which was posted to Hegseth’s personal X account and not to his official government account, caught many inside the Pentagon by surprise. As late as Monday, the military’s highest offices were still considering the potential ramifications.

But the Marine Corps were asking broader questions, too: Do they send more senior, experienced personnel so as not to put newer, less experienced troops at risk of potentially making a judgment call on whether to use force against a civilian?

What’s lawful under a domestic deployment — where troops may end up in a policing role — is governed by the Fourth Amendment in the U.S. Constitution, which forbids seizure of persons, including temporarily restraining them, unless it could be considered reasonable under the circumstances.

Troops under federal authorities are in general prohibited from conducting law enforcement on U.S. soil under the Posse Comitatus Act.

FILE – Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks during a news conference on the Autism report by the CDC at the Hubert Humphrey Building Auditorium in Washington, April 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday removed every member of a scientific committee that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on how to use vaccines and pledged to replace them with his own picks.

Major physicians and public health groups criticized the move to oust all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

Kennedy, who was one of the nation’s leading anti-vaccine activists before becoming the nation’s top health official, has not said who he would appoint to the panel, but said it would convene in just two weeks in Atlanta.

Although it’s typically not viewed as a partisan board, the entire current roster of committee members were Biden appointees.

“Without removing the current members, the current Trump administration would not have been able to appoint a majority of new members until 2028,” Kennedy wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece. “A clean sweep is needed to re-establish public confidence in vaccine science.”

When reached by phone, the panel’s now-former chair — Dr. Helen Keipp Talbot of Vanderbilt University — declined to comment. But another panel member, Noel Brewer at the University of North Carolina, said he and other committee members received an email late Monday afternoon that said their services on the committee had been terminated but gave no reason.

“I’d assumed I’d continue serving on the committee for my full term,” said Brewer, who joined the panel last summer.

Brewer is a behavioral scientist whose research examines why people get vaccinated and ways to improve vaccination coverage. Whether people get vaccinated is largely influenced by what their doctors recommend, and doctors have been following ACIP guidance.

“Up until today, ACIP recommendations were the gold standard for what insurers should pay for, what providers should recommend, and what the public should look to,” he said.

But Kennedy already took the unusual step of changing COVID-19 recommendations without first consulting the committee — a move criticized by doctors’ groups and public health advocates.

“It’s unclear what the future holds,” Brewer said. “Certainly provider organizations have already started to turn away from ACIP.”

Kennedy said the committee members had too many conflicts of interest. Currently, committee members are required to declare any potential such conflicts, as well as business interests, that arise during their tenure. They also must disclose any possible conflicts at the start of each public meeting.

But Dr. Tom Frieden, president and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives and former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Kennedy’s actions were based on false conflict-of-interest claims and set “a dangerous and unprecedented action that makes our families less safe” by potentially reducing vaccine access for millions of people.

“Make no mistake: Politicizing the ACIP as Secretary Kennedy is doing will undermine public trust under the guise of improving it,” he said in a statement. “We’ll look back at this as a grave mistake that sacrificed decades of scientific rigor, undermined public trust, and opened the door for fringe theories rather than facts.”

Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, called Kennedy’s mass ouster “a coup.”

“It’s not how democracies work. It’s not good for the health of the nation,” Benjamin told The Associated Press.

Benjamin said the move raises real concerns about whether future committee members will be viewed as impartial. He added that Kennedy is going against what he told lawmakers and the public, and the public health association plans to watch Kennedy “like a hawk.”

“He is breaking a promise,” Benjamin said. “He said he wasn’t going to do this.”

Dr. Bruce A. Scott, president of the American Medical Association, called the committee a trusted source of science- and data-driven advice and said Kennedy’s move, coupled with declining vaccination rates across the country, will help drive an increase in vaccine-preventable diseases.

“Today’s action to remove the 17 sitting members of ACIP undermines that trust and upends a transparent process that has saved countless lives,” Scott said in a statement.

Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a doctor who had expressed reservations about Kennedy’s nomination but voted to install him as the nation’s health secretary nonetheless, said he had spoken with Kennedy moments after the announcement.

“Of course, now the fear is that the ACIP will be filled up with people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion,” Cassidy said in a social media post. “I’ve just spoken with Secretary Kennedy, and I’ll continue to talk with him to ensure this is not the case.”

The committee had been in a state of flux since Kennedy took over. Its first meeting this year had been delayed when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services abruptly postponed its February meeting.

During Kennedy’s confirmation, Cassidy had expressed concerns about preserving the committee, saying he had sought assurances that Kennedy would keep the panel’s current vaccine recommendations.

The webpage that featured the committee’s members was deleted Monday evening, shortly after Kennedy’s announcement.

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Associated Press writers Zeke Miller, Devi Shastri and Mike Stobbe contributed.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

FILE – Rock star Sylvester “Sly” Stone of Sly and the Family Stone, April 1972. (AP Photo, File)

NEW YORK (AP) — Sly Stone, the revolutionary musician and dynamic showman whose Sly and the Family Stone transformed popular music in the 1960s and ’70s and beyond with such hits as “Everyday People,” “Stand!” and “Family Affair,” died Monday at age 82

Stone, born Sylvester Stewart, had been in poor health in recent years. His publicist Carleen Donovan said Stone died in Los Angeles surrounded by family after contending with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other ailments.

Founded in 1966-67, Sly and the Family Stone was the first major group to include Black and white men and women, and well embodied a time when anything seemed possible — riots and assassinations, communes and love-ins. The singers screeched, chanted, crooned and hollered. The music was a blowout of frantic horns, rapid-fire guitar and locomotive rhythms, a melting pot of jazz, psychedelic rock, doo-wop, soul and the early grooves of funk.

Sly’s time on top was brief, roughly from 1968-1971, but profound. No band better captured the gravity-defying euphoria of the Woodstock era or more bravely addressed the crash which followed. From early songs as rousing as their titles — “I Want To Take You Higher,” “Stand!” — to the sober aftermath of “Family Affair” and “Runnin’ Away,” Sly and the Family Stone spoke for a generation whether or not it liked what they had to say.

Stone’s group began as a Bay Area sextet featuring Sly on keyboards, Larry Graham on bass; Sly’s brother, Freddie, on guitar; sister Rose on vocals; Cynthia Robinson and Jerry Martini horns and Greg Errico on drums. They debuted with the album “A Whole New Thing” and earned the title with their breakthrough single, “Dance to the Music.” It hit the top 10 in April 1968, the week the Rev. Martin Luther King was murdered, and helped launch an era when the polish of Motown and the understatement of Stax suddenly seemed of another time.

Led by Sly Stone, with his leather jumpsuits and goggle shades, mile-wide grin and mile-high Afro, the band dazzled in 1969 at the Woodstock festival and set a new pace on the radio. “Everyday People,” “I Wanna Take You Higher” and other songs were anthems of community, non-conformity and a brash and hopeful spirit, built around such catchphrases as “different strokes for different folks.” The group released five top 10 singles, three of them hitting No. 1, and three million-selling albums: “Stand!”, “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” and “Greatest Hits.”

For a time, countless performers wanted to look and sound like Sly and the Family Stone. The Jackson Five’s breakthrough hit, “I Want You Back,” and the Temptations’ “I Can’t Get Next to You” were among the many songs from the late 1960s that mimicked Sly’s vocal and instrumental arrangements. Miles Davis’ landmark blend of jazz, rock and funk, “Bitches Brew,” was inspired in part by Sly, while fellow jazz artist Herbie Hancock even named a song after him.

“He had a way of talking, moving from playful to earnest at will. He had a look, belts, and hats and jewelry,” Questlove wrote in the foreword to Stone’s memoir, “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” named for one of his biggest hits and published through Questlove’s imprint in 2023. “He was a special case, cooler than everything around him by a factor of infinity.”

In 2025, Questlove released the documentary “Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius).”

Sly’s influence has endured for decades. The top funk artist of the 1970s, Parliament-Funkadelic creator George Clinton, was a Stone disciple. Prince, Rick James and the Black Eyed Peas were among the many performers from the 1980s and after shaped in part by Sly, and countless hip-hop artists have sampled his riffs, from the Beastie Boys to Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. A 2005 tribute record included Maroon 5, John Legend and the Roots.

“Sly did so many things so well that he turned my head all the way around,” Clinton once wrote. “He could create polished R&B that sounded like it came from an act that had gigged at clubs for years, and then in the next breath he could be as psychedelic as the heaviest rock band.”

A dream dies, a career burns away

By the early ’70s, Stone himself was beginning a descent from which he never recovered, driven by the pressures of fame and the added burden of Black fame. His record company was anxious for more hits, while the Black Panthers were pressing him to drop the white members from his group. After moving from the Bay Area to Los Angeles in 1970, he became increasingly hooked on cocaine and erratic in his behavior. A promised album, “The Incredible and Unpredictable Sly and the Family Stone” (“The most optimistic of all,” Rolling Stone reported) never appeared. He became notorious for being late to concerts or not showing up at all, often leaving “other band members waiting backstage for hours wondering whether he was going to show up or not,” according to Stone biographer Joel Selvin.

Around the country, separatism and paranoia were setting in. As a turn of the calendar, and as a state of mind, the ’60s were over. “The possibility of possibility was leaking out,” Stone later explained in his memoir.

On “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” Stone had warned: “Dying young is hard to take/selling out is harder.” Late in 1971, he released “There’s a Riot Going On,” one of the grimmest, most uncompromising records ever to top the album charts. The sound was dense and murky (Sly was among the first musicians to use drum machines), the mood reflective (“Family Affair”), fearful (“Runnin’ Away”) and despairing: “Time, they say, is the answer — but I don’t believe it,” Sly sings on “Time.” The fast, funky pace of the original “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” was slowed, stretched and retitled “Thank You For Talkin’ to Me, Africa.”

The running time of the title track was 0:00.

“It is Muzak with its finger on the trigger,” critic Greil Marcus called the album.

“Riot” highlighted an extraordinary run of blunt, hard-hitting records by Black artists, from the Stevie Wonder single “Superstition” to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” album, to which “Riot” was an unofficial response. But Stone seemed to back away from the nightmare he had related. He was reluctant to perform material from “Riot” in concert and softened the mood on the acclaimed 1973 album “Fresh,” which did feature a cover of “Que Sera Sera,” the wistful Doris Day song reworked into a rueful testament to fate’s upper hand.

By the end of the decade, Sly and the Family Stone had broken up and Sly was releasing solo records with such unmet promises as “Heard You Missed Me, Well I’m Back” and “Back On the Right Track.” Most of the news he made over the following decades was of drug busts, financial troubles and mishaps on stage. Sly and the Family Stone was inducted into the Rock & Roll of Fame in 1993 and honored in 2006 at the Grammy Awards, but Sly released just one album after the early ’80s, “I’m Back! Family & Friends,” much of it updated recordings of his old hits.

He would allege he had hundreds of unreleased songs and did collaborate on occasion with Clinton, who would recall how Stone “could just be sitting there doing nothing and then open his eyes and shock you with a lyric so brilliant that it was obvious no one had ever thought of it before.”

Sly Stone had three children, including a daughter with Cynthia Robinson, and was married once — briefly and very publicly. In 1974, he and actor Kathy Silva wed on stage at Madison Square Garden, an event that inspired an 11,000-word story in The New Yorker. Sly and Silva soon divorced.

A born musician, a born uniter

He was born Sylvester Stewart in Denton, Texas, and raised in Vallejo, California, the second of five children in a close, religious family. Sylvester became “Sly” by accident, when a teacher mistakenly spelled his name “Slyvester.”

He loved performing so much that his mother alleged he would cry if the congregation in church didn’t respond when he sang before it. He was so gifted and ambitious that by age 4 he had sung on stage at a Sam Cooke show and by age 11 had mastered several instruments and recorded a gospel song with his siblings. He was so committed to the races working together that in his teens and early 20s he was playing in local bands that included Black and white members and was becoming known around the Bay Area as a deejay equally willing to play the Beatles and rhythm and blues acts.

Through his radio connections, he produced some of the top San Francisco bands, including the Great Society, Grace Slick’s group before she joined the Jefferson Airplane. Along with an early mentor and champion, San Francisco deejay Tom “Big Daddy” Donahue, he worked on rhythm and blues hits (Bobby Freeman’s “C’mon and Swim”) and the Beau Brummels’ Beatle-esque “Laugh, Laugh.” Meanwhile, he was putting together his own group, recruiting family members and local musicians and settling on the name Sly and the Family Stone.

“A Whole New Thing” came out in 1967, soon followed by the single “Dance to the Music,” in which each member was granted a moment of introduction as the song rightly proclaimed a “brand new beat.” In December 1968, the group appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and performed a medley that included “Dance to the Music” and “Everyday People.” Before the set began, Sly turned to the audience and recited a brief passage from his song “Are You Ready”:

“Don’t hate the Black,

don’t hate the white,

if you get bitten,

just hate the bite.”