By ANNE D’INNOCENZIO, Associated Press Retail Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Shoppers increased their spending at a better-than-expected pace in August from July, helped by back-to-school purchases, even as President Donald Trump’s tariffs are starting to hurt the job market and lead to price hikes.

Retail sales rose 0.6% last month from July, when sales were up a revised 0.6%, according to the Commerce Department’s report.

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The performance, announced Tuesday, was also likely helped by the continued efforts by Americans to keep pushing up purchases ahead of expected price increases. Moreover, higher prices could be bolstering the number as well.

The increases followed two straight months of spending declines in April and May.

Excluding auto sales, which have been volatile since Trump imposed tariffs on many foreign-made cars, retail sales rose 0.7% in August.

The data showed solid spending across various stores. Business at electronics and appliance stores up 0.3%, while online retailers had a 2% increase. Business at restaurants rose 0.7%.

Robert Redford, the Hollywood golden boy who became an Oscar-winning director, liberal activist and godfather for independent cinema under the name of one of his best-loved characters, died Tuesday at 89.

Redford died “at his home at Sundance in the mountains of Utah — the place he loved, surrounded by those he loved,” publicist Cindi Berger said in a statement. No cause of death was provided.

After rising to stardom in the 1960s, Redford was one of the biggest stars of the ’70s with such films as “The Candidate,” “All the President’s Men” and “The Way We Were,” capping that decade with the best director Oscar for 1980’s “Ordinary People,” which also won best picture in 1980. His wavy blond hair and boyish grin made him the most desired of leading men, but he worked hard to transcend his looks — whether through his political advocacy, his willingness to take on unglamorous roles or his dedication to providing a platform for low-budget movies.

His roles ranged from Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward to a mountain man in “Jeremiah Johnson” to a double agent in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and his co-stars included Jane Fonda, Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise. But his most famous screen partner was his old friend and fellow activist and practical joker Paul Newman, their films a variation of their warm, teasing relationship off screen. Redford played the wily outlaw opposite Newman in 1969’s “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” a box-office smash from which Redford’s Sundance Institute and festival got its name. He also teamed with Newman on 1973’s best picture Oscar winner, “The Sting,” which earned Redford a best-actor nomination as a young con artist in 1930s Chicago.

Film roles after the ’70s became more sporadic as Redford concentrated on directing and producing, and his new role as patriarch of the independent-film movement in the 1980s and ’90s through his Sundance Institute. But he starred in 1985’s best picture champion “Out of Africa” and in 2013 received some of the best reviews of his career as a shipwrecked sailor in “All is Lost,” in which he was the film’s only performer. In 2018, he was praised again in what he called his farewell movie, “The Old Man and the Gun.”

“I just figure that I’ve had a long career that I’m very pleased with. It’s been so long, ever since I was 21,” he told The Associated Press shortly before the film came out. “I figure now as I’m getting into my 80s, it’s maybe time to move toward retirement and spend more time with my wife and family.”

Sundance is born

Redford had watched Hollywood grow more cautious and controlling during the 1970s and wanted to recapture the creative spirit of the early part of the decade. Sundance was created to nurture new talent away from the pressures of Hollywood, the institute providing a training ground and the festival, based in Park City, Utah, where Redford had purchased land with the initial hope of opening a ski resort. Instead, Park City became a place of discovery for such previously unknown filmmakers as Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, Paul Thomas Anderson and Darren Aronofsky.

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“For me, the word to be underscored is ‘independence,’” Redford told the AP in 2018. “I’ve always believed in that word. That’s what led to me eventually wanting to create a category that supported independent artists who weren’t given a chance to be heard.

“The industry was pretty well controlled by the mainstream, which I was a part of. But I saw other stories out there that weren’t having a chance to be told and I thought, ‘Well, maybe I can commit my energies to giving those people a chance.’ As I look back on it, I feel very good about that.”

Sundance was even criticized as buyers swarmed in looking for potential hits and celebrities overran the town each winter.

“We have never, ever changed our policies for how we program our festival. It’s always been built on diversity,” Redford told the AP in 2004. “The fact is that the diversity has become commercial. Because independent films have achieved their own success, Hollywood, being just a business, is going to grab them. So when Hollywood grabs your films, they go, ‘Oh, it’s gone Hollywood.’”

By 2025, the festival had become so prominent that organizers decided they had outgrown Park City and approved relocating to Boulder, Colorado, starting in 2027. Redford, who had attended the University of Colorado in Boulder, issued a statement saying that “change is inevitable, we must always evolve and grow, which has been at the core of our survival.”

Redford was married twice, most recently to Sibylle Szaggars. He had four children, two of whom have died — Scott Anthony, who died in infancy, in 1959; and James Redford, an activist and filmmaker who died in 2020.

Redford’s early life

Robert Redford was born Charles Robert Redford Jr. on Aug. 18, 1937, in Santa Monica, a California boy whose blond good looks eased his way over an apprenticeship in television and live theater that eventually led to the big screen.

Redford attended college on a baseball scholarship and would later star as a middle-aged slugger in 1984’s “The Natural,” the adaptation of Bernard Malamud’s baseball novel. He had an early interest in drawing and painting, then went on to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, debuting on Broadway in the late 1950s and moving into television on such shows as “The Twilight Zone,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “The Untouchables.”

After scoring a Broadway lead in “Sunday in New York,” Redford was cast by director Mike Nichols in a production of Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park,” later starring with Fonda in the film version. Redford did miss out on one of Nichols’ greatest successes, “The Graduate,” released in 1967. Nichols had considered casting Redford in the part eventually played by Dustin Hoffman, but Redford seemed unable to relate to the socially awkward young man who ends up having an affair with one of his parents’ friends.

“I said, ‘You can’t play it. You can never play a loser,’” Nichols said during a 2003 screening of the film in New York. “And Redford said, ‘What do you mean? Of course I can play a loser.’ And I said, ‘OK, have you ever struck out with a girl?’ and he said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he wasn’t joking.”

Bob Thomas, a longtime Associated Press journalist who died in 2014, was the principal writer of this obituary.

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By MICHAEL R. SISAK, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — Luigi Mangione is due in court Tuesday as his lawyers push to have his state murder charges thrown out in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. They argue that the New York case and a parallel federal death penalty prosecution amount to double jeopardy.

Also to be decided: a trial date and whether the state case or federal case will go first.

It’s Mangione’s first court appearance in the state case since February. The 27-year-old Ivy League graduate has attracted a cult following as a stand-in for frustrations with the health insurance industry. Dozens of his supporters showed up to his last hearing, many wearing the Luigi video game character’s green color as a symbol of solidarity. His April arraignment in the federal case drew a similar outpouring.

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If Judge Gregory Carro permits the state case to go forward, Mangione’s lawyers have said they want him to dismiss terrorism charges and bar prosecutors from using evidence collected during Mangione’s arrest last December, including a 9 mm handgun and a notebook in which authorities say he described his intent to “wack” an insurance executive.

Prosecutors want the judge to force Mangione’s lawyers to state whether they’ll pursue an insanity defense or introduce psychiatric evidence of any mental disease or defect he may have.

Carro could either rule on those requests on Tuesday, schedule additional hearings or issue written decisions at a later date.

Mangione has pleaded not guilty to multiple counts of murder, including murder as an act of terrorism, in the Dec. 4, 2024, killing. Surveillance video showed a masked gunman shooting Thompson from behind as he arrived for an investor conference at the New York Hilton Midtown. Police say “delay,” “deny” and “depose” were scrawled on the ammunition, mimicking a phrase commonly used to describe how insurers avoid paying claims.

Mangione was arrested five days later after he was spotted eating breakfast at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, about 230 miles (about 370 kilometers) west of New York City and whisked to Manhattan by plane and helicopter. Since then, he has been held at the same Brooklyn federal jail where Sean “Diddy” Combs is locked up.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office contends that there are no double jeopardy issues because neither of Mangione’s cases has gone to trial and because the state and federal prosecutions involve different legal theories.

Mangione’s lawyers say the dueling cases have created a “legal quagmire” that makes it “legally and logistically impossible to defend against them simultaneously.”

The state charges, which carry a maximum of life in prison, allege that Mangione wanted to “intimidate or coerce a civilian population,” that is, insurance employees and investors. The federal charges allege that Mangione stalked Thompson and do not involve terror allegations.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced in April that she was directing federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty for “an act of political violence” and a “premeditated, cold-blooded assassination that shocked America.”

The Manhattan district attorney’s office quoted extensively from Mangione’s handwritten diary in a court filing seeking to uphold his state murder charges. They highlighted his desire to kill an insurance honcho and his praise for Ted Kaczynski, the late terrorist known as the Unabomber.

In the writings, prosecutors said, Mangione mused about rebelling against “the deadly, greed fueled health insurance cartel” and said killing an industry executive “conveys a greedy bastard that had it coming.” They also cited a confession they say he penned “To the feds,” in which he wrote that “it had to be done.”

Mangione’s “intentions were obvious from his acts, but his writings serve to make those intentions explicit,” prosecutors said in the June filing. The writings, which they sometimes described as a manifesto, “convey one clear message: that the murder of Brian Thompson was intended to bring about revolutionary change to the healthcare industry.”

ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia’s highest court has declined to consider Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ appeal of her removal from the Georgia election interference case against Donald Trump and others.

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Citing an “appearance of impropriety” created a romantic relationship Willis had with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, whom she had hired to lead the case, the Georgia Court of Appeals in December ruled that Willis and her office could not continue to prosecute the case. Willis in January asked the Georgia Supreme Court to review that ruling, and the high court on Tuesday declined to take up the case.

That means it will be up to the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia to find another prosecutor to take over the case. That person could continue on the track that Willis has taken, decide to pursue only some charges or dismiss the case altogether. It could be difficult to find a prosecutor willing to take the case, given its complex nature and the resources required.

Even if a new prosecutor wants to continue on the path charted by Willis, it seems unlikely that Trump could be prosecuted now that he’s the sitting president. But there are 14 other defendants who still face charges in the case.

A grand jury in Atlanta indicted Trump and 18 others in August 2023, using the state’s anti-racketeering law to accuse them of participating in a wide-ranging scheme to illegally try to overturn Trump’s narrow 2020 presidential election loss to Democrat Joe Biden in Georgia. The alleged scheme included Trump’s call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger urging him to help find enough votes to beat Biden. Four people have pleaded guilty.