Obama calls Congressional leaders to meetings in bid to end political deadlock

President Barack Obama renewed efforts to reopen government by calling face-to-face meetings with Republicans as financial markets grew increasingly concerned that the political standoff in Washington might spill over into an unprecedented US debt default.

The stalemate between the White House and Republicans in the House of Representatives over a budget has pushed the government shutdown into a tenth day and left a bitterly divided Congress with a week to agree an increase in the borrowing limit to pay the country's bills and avoid a default.

Mr Obama met House Democrats yesterday ahead of meetings with Senate Democrats, House Republicans and Senate Republicans this week in a bid to break the impasse caused by the refusal of Republicans to fund government without the president's healthcare law being delayed or repealed.

Latest casualties
The House moved to aid the latest casualties of the shutdown, the families of US soldiers killed on duty, by voting unanimously to restore benefits that were cut in the shutdown.

White House press secretary Jay Carney said before the vote that the president "expects this to be fixed today", restoring a $100,000 benefit that allows military families plan funerals for dead relatives.

The families were excluded from a Bill passed on the eve of the shutdown that allowed US military to continue to be paid while more than 700,000 government workers were sent home on unpaid leave.

Mr Carney faced repeated questions about when the president first knew about the suspension of the benefit, which the Pentagon had warned Congress about unless it was specifically addressed.

World Bank president Jim Yong Kim warned that the threat of a US default when the US runs out of cash on October 17th could hurt the world's poorest people and emerging markets.

"We're very concerned because right now there's so many headwinds as it is for emerging markets and the developing world, that that kind of impact really could be devastating," he said in an interview at the annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington.