(Updated) Obama Postpons Visit Due To Us Shutdown.

KUALA LUMPUR: President Barack Obama has postponed a visit to Malaysia due to the US government shutdown, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak said on Wednesday. Obama was set to visit Malaysia for an address scheduled for Oct 11 as part of a four-country swing through South-East Asia including international summits in Indonesia and Brunei.
 It is not immediately clear whether the budget crisis in Washington will affect the rest of the US president's long-planned trip to Asia. State news agency Bernama and other media outlets quoted Najib as saying Obama's trip was now off. He would send Secretary of State John Kerry to Malaysia in his place, reports said. "Obama expressed his disappointment that he was unable to visit Malaysia as scheduled," Najib was quoted as saying by the Malaysian Insider news website.
 "However, the Secretary of State John Kerry will come... as Obama's representative." A spokeswoman in Najib's office confirmed the reports, saying Kerry would step in for Obama during his planned speech at an entrepreneurs summit in Kuala Lumpur on Oct 11, but declined further comment. The US president was also due to attend back-to-back summits of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) bloc on the Indonesian island of Bali and an East Asia summit in Brunei next week.
 The Philippine government refused to comment on whether a planned stop by Obama in Manila would be affected. "As of yesterday, the trip was still proceeding and pushing through. But given the situation (in the United States) we would certainly understand if they had to cancel," Philippine government spokesman Ricky Carandang told AFP. The White House has not yet announced any changes to Obama's travel plans. White House spokesman Jay Carney on Tuesday said:
 "We have no changes to announce to the president's schedule" It was reported earlier that a number of US government websites and Twitter feeds have been suspended due to a partial US government shutdown. Nasa's website was unavailable as non-essential services were closed, and the White House web page was not being updated, after a lapse in federal funding. The US Department of Homeland Security was not responding to public emails submitted via its website.
 US government employees affected by the shutdown were not able to access email. Republican opposition to President Obama's healthcare reform law, the Affordable Care Act, lead to the the government shutdown yesterday. The act, known also as Obamacare, has caused legislative deadlock. Congress failed to pass legislation to fund the government on Monday. Workers' email access suspended Thousands of federal workers who had been sent home yesterday were barred from accessing work emails as part of US government policy.
 The same US law which gave the legal basis for the shutdown, the Antideficiency Act, also prohibited work "via mobile devices or remote computer connections" for employees who had been sent home. Communications channels for members of the public were also affected by the shutdown. US citizens can normally use federal websites and Twitter feeds to put queries to government institutions.
 Yesterday, email questions from the public were not being processed by US bodies including the US Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. "Due to the lapse in government funding, information on this website will not be routinely updated, the transactions submitted via the website may not be processed, and the department may not be able to respond to inquiries until funding has been restored," read a notice on the Department of Justice site.
 People trying to reach Nasa's main website were redirected to a US government notice explaining that the page was not available. Other federal websites such as the US Department of Agriculture and the US Census Bureau displayed holding pages. Dozens of Twitter feeds, including tweets from the National Park Service for the Statue of Liberty, were stopped. Smaller federal institutions such as the Smithsonian National Zoo were affected by the shutdown.
 The zoo's webcams, which normally stream images of giant pandas, cheetahs, flamingos, and naked mole rats, were also down. "None of our live animal cams will broadcast," said a notice on the Smithsonian National Zoo web page. "The cams require federal resources, primarily staff, to run and broadcast. They've been deemed non-essential during the shutdown."