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President says he has plans to make capital ‘safer and more beautiful’ after social media attack on homeless peopleHello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.We start with news that president Donald Trump is promising new steps to tackle homelessness and crime in Washington, prompting the city’s mayor to voice concerns about the potential use of the National Guard to patrol the streets in the nation’s capital.Four days after JD Vance reportedly asked top Trump administration officials to come up with a new communications strategy for dealing with the scandal around the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, the vice-president appears to have put his foot in it, sparking a new round of online outrage even as he tried to defuse the furor.The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, has stepped up his war of words with Democratic lawmakers who have left the state to foil an aggressive redistricting plan aimed at giving his Republican party five additional seats in Congress, saying on Sunday that the fight “could literally last years”.Nvidia and AMD have agreed to give the US government 15% of their revenues from chip sales in China, under an unprecedented arrangement to obtain export licenses for the semiconductors, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.The United States, a veto-wielding permanent member of the UN security council, offered support for Israel and accused those nations who supported Sunday’s meeting of “actively prolonging the war by spreading lies about Israel”. “Israel has a right to decide what is necessary for its security and what measure measures are appropriate to end the threat posed by Hamas,” said the US envoy to the UN, Dorothy Shea.The United States has pledged to consult its European partners before a meeting between US president Donald Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin, Polish prime minister Donald Tusk said on Monday.The US and China have not yet announced an extension to their tariff deadline, with tensions flaring up again just as a fragile truce nears its expiry. Following the latest bilateral meeting in Stockholm in July, Beijing said that both sides would work toward extending the tariff truce by another 90 days.A federal judge in Hawaii has ruled that commercial fishing is illegal in the Pacific Islands Heritage marine national monument, a federally protected area in the central Pacific Ocean. Continue reading...