Obama to launch series of trips on economic plans

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House says President Barack Obama's trip to Austin, Texas, on Thursday will kick off a series of day trips aimed at highlighting his proposals on jobs and the economy.

While in Texas, Obama will visit a technical high school and meet with entrepreneurs. He'll also drop in on a tech company and talk with blue-collar workers.

The trip show Obama wants to keep Americans focused on his economic proposals even while Congress is busy with an immigration overhaul and confirmation for Obama's second-term Cabinet nominees.

The White House says Obama will travel every few weeks and will emphasize his State of the Union proposals to expand pre-kindergarten and raise the minimum wage.

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Series of bombs kills at least 22 in Baghdad: police

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Car bombs and roadside blasts killed at least 22 people in Shi'ite districts across the Iraqi capital Baghdad on Tuesday, police and hospital sources said.

Sunni Islamist insurgents tied to al Qaeda have stepped up their campaign of attacks this year in an attempt to trigger sectarian tensions and undermine Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Shi'ite-led government.

(Reporting by Kareem Raheem and Ahmed Rasheed; writing by Patrick Markey)

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Sorry 'Arrested Development' fans, Netflix series is probably a 'One-Off'

NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) - "Arrested Development" fans who want the show to come back for good had better start looking for someone to help them out. Netflix will release the fourth season of the show in May, but CEO Reed Hastings said that's all his company has signed up for.

Speaking at Morgan Stanley's Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco on Monday, Hastings said he didn't anticipate being able to do season five, six or seven - just the forthcoming fourth season.

"It's a fantastic one-off," Hastings said, citing his company's lack of control over the Fox and Imagine-produced show. "Think about it as a non-repeatable amazing."

Despite its passionate audience, the critically beloved comedy was canceled by Fox in 2006 after three seasons due to low ratings. Years later, Netflix stepped in to distribute a new season.

Creator Mitchell Hurwitz said this month at AllThingsD's Dive Into Media conference that Netflix was one of the only places where the show could live. A movie, he said, would be too difficult because time has passed since the show last aired, but releasing the show all at once, as Netflix will do, enabled him to film around his actors' schedules.

Hastings on Monday tried to downplay the importance of original shows to Netflix's bottom line while concurrently recognizing that they were essential to its future. Netflix, which just released the "House of Cards," has several new shows coming this year, including Eli Roth's "Hemlock Grove" and Jenji Kohan's "Orange is the New Black."

"It may be the center of the PR for a while and that's OK, but i don't want you guys to think that suddenly we're the original content company," Hastings said.

Companies like Hulu and Amazon are also investing in original programming, and Hastings compared them all to successful cable channels, such as HBO, Showtime, FX and Starz. Yet only one can be HBO.

"We want to be HBO," Hastings said. "And let others be the smaller ones."

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