Republicans want 'ransom' to end shutdown says Obama

US President Barack Obama has vowed not to allow Republicans to undermine his signature healthcare legislation as a condition to restart the US government.

The government has partially shut down after the two houses of Congress failed to agree to a new budget, with Republicans insisting on the repeal or delay of Mr Obama's health law.
"They demanded ransom," Mr Obama said.
More than 700,000 federal employees face unpaid leave, and national parks, museums and many buildings are closed.

On Tuesday, Mr Obama blamed conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives for the shutdown, saying "one faction of one party" was responsible because "they didn't like one law".
"They've shut down the government over an ideological crusade to deny affordable health insurance to millions of Americans," Mr Obama said at the White House.

He insisted Congress "pass a budget, end the government shutdown, pay your bills, prevent an economic shutdown".
'The good fight'
 

What does shutdown mean for two million federal employees, agencies and tourist destinations?

Republicans, meanwhile, have called for talks with the Democrats.

"Perhaps if President Obama spent less time giving hyper-partisan speeches and more time working with Congress solving problems, we wouldn't find ourselves in this avoidable situation," Rory Cooper, a spokesman for Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, told the BBC.

The White House has rejected a Republican plan to fund only a few portions of the government - national parks, veterans' programmes and the budget of the District of Columbia.

The Obama administration said it would veto any bill to fund the government in part.
"These piecemeal efforts are not serious, and they are no way to run a government," spokeswoman Amy Brundage said in a statement.
Mr Obama did sign a bill on Monday evening to ensure that the military would be paid during the shutdown.

Furloughed federal worker: "They're all ridiculous"

A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner called the White House's position "unsustainably hypocritical".
While the Democrats appear united in their opposition to opening discussions on changes to the health law known as Obamacare, signs of fissures have begun to show within the Republican Party.
Representative Scott Rigell broke ranks with Republican leadership and threw his support behind a budget bill that would leave the health law untouched.
"We fought the good fight," he told the New York Times.
And Representative Peter King told the Washington Post he was "the only one who spoke strongly in opposition" to the shutdown, describing his conservative colleagues as "living in their own echo chamber, hearing themselves and talking to each other".
While the Democrats and Republicans blame one another for the morass, a poll released on Tuesday suggested the American public was inclined to fault the Republican strategy.
An estimated 72% of voters oppose Congress shutting down the federal government in order to block the health law, according a poll by Quinnipiac University.
Who is affected?

• State department will be able to operate for limited time
• Department of defence will continue military operations
• Department of education will still distribute $22bn (£13.6bn) to public schools, but staffing is expected to be severely hit
• Department of energy - 12,700 staff expected to be sent home, with 1,113 remaining to oversee nuclear arsenal
• Department of health and human services expected to send home more than half of staff
• The Federal Reserve, dept of homeland security, and justice dept will see little or no disruption
• US Postal Services continue as normal
• Smithsonian institutions, museums, zoos and many national parks will close

The government ceased operations deemed non-essential at midnight on Tuesday, when the previous budget expired.

National parks and Washington's Smithsonian museums are closed, pension and veterans' benefit cheques will be delayed, and visa and passport applications will go unprocessed.

Couples who had hoped to wed on national park land had to make new plans.
Members of the military will be paid during the shutdown, but base commissaries selling inexpensive and tax-free groceries will close beginning on Wednesday, affecting an estimated 12 million people who shop there.
Programmes deemed essential, such as air traffic control and food inspections, will continue.
Debt ceiling looms

The Democrats have insisted on a "clean" budget bill that would keep the government funded at current levels, while the House Republicans attached a series of measures that would repeal, defund or delay the health law.

Goldman Sachs estimates a three-week shutdown could shave as much as 0.9% from US GDP this quarter.
The healthcare law passed in 2010, was subsequently validated by the US Supreme Court, and was a major issue in the 2012 presidential election that Mr Obama won handily.

One of its major provisions - new online marketplaces for individuals to buy subsidised health insurance - took effect on Tuesday.

As lawmakers grappled with the latest shutdown, the 17 October deadline for extending the government's borrowing limit looms ever larger.

On that date, the US government will reach the limit at which it can borrow money to pay its bills, the so-called debt ceiling.

House Republicans have also demanded a series of policy concessions - including on the president's health law and on financial and environmental regulations - in exchange for raising the debt ceiling.

National Security Agency keeps millions of Web users' metadata for a year

The U.S. National Security Agency keeps millions of Web users' metadata for a year, even if the users are not suspected of wrongdoing, a leaked paper indicates.

The Obama administration insists the NSA keeps only the content of messages and communications of people it is intentionally targeting.

The metadata stored by the NSA provides a record of almost everything a person does online, including tracking browsing history, email activity and some account passwords, the top-secret document leaked to British newspaper The Guardian by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden indicates.

The leaked document is an introductory guide to digital network intelligence for NSA field agents, The Guardian said.

Any computer metadata picked up by NSA collection systems is routed to the agency's metadata repository, code-named Marina, the guide explains.
Phone metadata is sent to a separate system called Nucleon.

"The Marina metadata application tracks a user's browser experience, gathers contact information/content and develops summaries of target," the guide says in Tuesday's Guardian report.

"Of the more distinguishing features, Marina has the ability to look back on the last 365 days' worth of DNI metadata seen by the SIGINT collection system, regardless whether or not it was tasked for collection," the guide says, referring in the capitalized initials to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and to signals intelligence.

Looking back on a person's 365-day history can let the spy agency find information about someone who later becomes a target, The Guardian said.

But having this ability depends on keeping personal information of millions of Internet users who never will be of interest to the U.S. intelligence community, the newspaper said.

The Guardian asked the NSA to explain the 365-day storage of untargeted people's data and to estimate how much U.S. citizens' metadata was kept in its repositories.

The NSA didn't address the questions in its response, focusing instead on its foreign intelligence activities.
"NSA is a foreign intelligence agency," the statement said. "NSA's foreign intelligence activities are conducted pursuant to procedures approved by the U.S. attorney general and the secretary of defense, and, where applicable, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, to protect the privacy interests of Americans.
"These interests must be addressed in the collection, retention and dissemination of any information," the spy agency said. "Moreover, all queries of lawfully collected data must be conducted for a foreign intelligence purpose.

"We know there is a false perception out there that NSA listens to the phone calls and reads the email of everyday Americans, aiming to unlawfully monitor or profile US citizens. It's just not the case.

"NSA's activities are directed against foreign intelligence targets in response to requirements from U.S. leaders in order to protect the nation and its interests from threats such as terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."