The Dodgers are rolling into the spring training season with a full head of steam, thanks to the off-season acquisitions of superstar outfielder Mookie Betts and starting pitcher David Price.

That’s the thing about baseball: There’s always something new or noteworthy.

In Glendale, Ariz., spring home of the Dodgers, fans interested in off-the-field experiences will applaud the opening of Ballpark Boulevard, a 1.62-mile road designed to streamline traffic to and from the ballpark and to Glendale’s Westgate Entertainment District, 8 million square feet of office, parks, shopping, dining and entertainment.

“The opening of Ballpark Boulevard north of Camelback Ranch-Glendale will greatly enhance the spring training experience for Dodger fans traveling to Arizona this spring,” said Dodgers president and chief executive Stan Kasten, who was on hand for the ribbon-cutting ceremony. “Fans can now approach our beautiful campus from the north, and the new stretch of road will provide a streamlined exit for those heading to the many entertainment choices in Glendale.”

Westgate is also home to the recently reopened and expanded 75,000-square-foot Desert Diamond Casino, with a gaming floor that includes poker and blackjack tables with live bingo and five restaurants. It’s the largest of its kind in Arizona and is owned and operated by the Tohono O’Odham Nation.

Farther down Glendale Avenue, Haus Murphy’s, an old-fashioned German biergarten and taproom, serves German beer on draft and traditional Old-World dishes, such as sauerbraten, schnitzel, sausages and giant pretzels, accompanied by polka music.

The Dodgers will face rival San Francisco Giants at the spring opener Saturday at the recently renovated Scottsdale Stadium.

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The spiffing-up includes a new 10,000-square-foot home-team clubhouse and year-round municipal event and conference center, a mass transit and ride-hail pickup and drop-off lane in front of the new Home Plate entrance, and the expansion of the Charro Lodge premium ballpark party section perched above the Giants’ bullpen and right field wall.

Old Town and downtown Scottsdale will always have an air of nostalgia, fueled in part by the Hotel Valley Ho, which dates to 1956. Valley Ho and the Mountain Shadows Resort Scottsdale, along the foothills of Camelback Mountain, both offer a three-night Play Ball package that includes a $100 resort credit and a $20 breakfast credit.

In its 10th season as shared spring home of the Arizona Diamondbacks and Colorado Rockies, Salt River Fields was recently named the best spring training ballpark of the decade by BallparkDigest.com.

The Dodgers play the Diamondbacks at Salt River Fields on Feb. 25 and the Rockies on Feb. 29 at Camelback Stadium.

Angels

The Angels were also big players during the off-season signing 2019 World Series hero and former Washington Nationals third baseman Anthony Rendon to a seven-year, $245-million contract.

The long-anticipated return to the pitching mound of 2018 Rookie of the Year Shohei Ohtani has also been delayed until May because of surgery to his left knee last season. Ohtani is scheduled to resume the other part of his dual role as the team’s designated hitter on opening day.

The Angels have been working at Tempe Diablo Stadium since 1993. It opened in 1969 as the first and only spring training home to the one-season wonder Seattle Pilots and also has served as home park to the Milwaukee Brewers and Seattle Mariners. Its 9,558 capacity is the smallest in the Cactus League.

The Angels open the Cactus League season Feb. 22 against the Chicago White Sox (who share Camelback Ranch with the Dodgers). The Halos play their first home game at Diablo Stadium against the Colorado Rockies on Feb. 23.

Tempe Diablo Stadium is in the middle of the vibrant Arizona State University campus and thus has no shortage of dining, drinking and entertainment options. The day games start at 1:05 or 1:10 and conclude around 4 or 4:30, funneling right into happy hour in downtown Tempe.

A plethora of breweries and brew pubs in the area includes the Four Peaks Brewing Co. offering pre-game tours of its 8th Street brewery before eight games on the Angels home schedule. A $15 ticket includes a Kilt Lifter bratwurst (made with the brewery’s signature scotch ale), a pint of any Four Peaks beer, a baseball hat and a walking tour highlighting the brewery’s history.

Tucked into a small residential pocket, the Shop Brewery, a block off Tempe’s University Drive, is the former home of Harry Mitchell, a Tempe mayor and later a U.S. congressman, and his son Mark, the current mayor of Tempe. It has a rotation of 15 beers on draft and cans and bottles to go.

Just across University Drive, the Taste of Topps taproom connected to Topps Liquors offers a selection of draft and bottled beers, including 30 rotating craft taps and more than 600 varieties of bottled and canned craft beer to drink on premise or to take out.

Fitting in with the campus theme the Graduate Hotel feels like a hybrid of a college dorm and 1960s and ’70s inspired boutique hotel. It’s right on the Arizona State University campus with a direct view of the ASU Gammage Theater and Old Main mall. Shuttle service is also available for Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport. The hotel offers a spring-training package that includes a $25 dining credit, and two complimentary morning cocktails and free parking.

Tempe’s Innings Festival, Feb. 29 and March 1, might be the premier baseball-related entertainment event. It will have batting cages and baseball celebrities, including former Dodgers and Angels players such as Eric Davis and Wally Joyner and a two-day music festival featuring headliners Weezer and the Dave Matthews Band and a variety of rock, pop and alt country artists at Tempe Beach Park.

The Dodgers and Angels will square off at Camelback Ranch on Feb. 26 and at Diablo Stadium on March 20.

When President Trump pardoned Michael Milken on Tuesday, it came just a week after the former junk bond king’s Milken Institute had wrapped up its latest conference in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

The gathering featured a mix of high-powered leaders, including hedge-fund guru Ray Dalio and former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan, but it wasn’t just about how to make money or navigate the Washington thicket. Reflecting the Santa Monica institute’s focus, the program of the 2020 Middle East and Africa Summit featured sessions on health, global diseases, education and the environment.

The event marked the latest manifestation of the 73-year-old Los Angeles resident’s decades-long commitment to philanthropy. It began before he pleaded guilty to felony violations of securities laws in 1990, but ramped up in the years since in what became either an intentional or unintentional effort, depending on your view, to rehabilitate his image as the poster boy of 1980s greed.

In a tearful admission of guilt in a Manhattan federal courtroom, Milken pleaded in April 1990 to counts of conspiracy; aiding and abetting failure to meet federal securities disclosure regulations; securities fraud; aiding and abetting a regulated broker-dealer to violate securities reporting requirements; mail fraud, and assisting in filing a false tax return.

Milken was given a 10-year sentence, fined $200 million and required to pay $400 million in restitution. He settled lawsuits for an additional $500 million. He served 22 months at a minimum-security prison dubbed “Club Fed” in Dublin, Calif., and was released after testifying against a former colleague. He also was banned for life from the securities industry.

Milken was among 11 felons who were either granted pardons or commutations of their sentences by Trump on Tuesday. Among the others was former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who was serving a 14-year sentence for trying to sell an open U.S. Senate seat held by Barack Obama.

Trump’s decision follows a long campaign by Milken and his supporters to win a pardon for him. In 2008, Milken retained high-powered Washington attorney Theodore Olson, who served as solicitor general under President George W. Bush, to engineer a pardon, but the president declined to grant the application.

In 2018, financier Anthony Scaramucci, who served briefly as Trump’s communications director, told The Times that L.A. financier Gary Winnick, a former associate of Milken at now-defunct investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert, had raised the issue at Trump’s inauguration, citing his “commitment to health and global progress.”

Other proponents of a Milken pardon at the time were said to include Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor; Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin; and Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s outside counsel. It was Giuliani’s investigation of Wall Street malfeasance in the 1980s, when he was a federal prosecutor, that led to Milken’s guilty plea and imprisonment.

In its statement announcing the pardon, the White House called Milken “one of America’s greatest financiers” whose work created entire industries and “also democratized corporate finance by providing women and minorities access to capital that would have been unavailable to them otherwise.”

The statement noted Milken’s contributions to medical research, education and disadvantaged children and named more than 30 supporters of the pardon in the private equity, hedge fund, real estate and other industries. They include Winnick, Giuliani, billionaires Tom Barrack, Ron Burkle and Sheldon Adelson; L.A. Angels owner Arte Moreno; and media titan Rupert Murdoch.

In remarks made at Joint Base Andrews, Trump said Milken has “done an incredible job for the world. He suffered greatly. He paid a big price, a very tough price, but he’s done an incredible job.”

Robert Hockett, a Cornell Law School professor and expert on financial regulation, said that Milken’s years-long campaign to clear his name rubs against the very notion of contrition. “I would think if he was actually doing this to atone, then he wouldn’t be trying to get the record expunged,” Hockett said.

Milken pioneered the issuance of high-yield bonds for companies that were running out of money or needed capital but didn’t have access to it through traditional Wall Street channels.

Milken, an Encino native, moved the bond operation from New York to Beverly Hills in 1978.

The issues gained the unflattering name of junk bonds because of their higher risk of default. The bonds also drew critics as they were employed by corporate raiders to take over and loot functioning corporations, laying off workers by the thousands and draining the savings of retirees.

Milken wasn’t known for lavish living, but his $550-million salary and bonus in 1987 alone prompted outcries. And his 1980s-era investment conferences at the Beverly Hilton were dubbed Predators’ Balls for attracting corporate raiders looking for new takeover targets.

When Milken was sentenced in 1990, Richard C. Breeden, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, said that the trader “stood at the center of a network of manipulation, fraud, and deceit.” At the time, Milken’s record-setting pay amounted to a quarter of the annual budget for Breeden’s agency.

Milken, however, has long defended his pioneering work, saying the access to low-cost capital created more jobs than were lost.

“I’m proud of what we accomplished at Drexel,” he told Forbes magazine in 1992. “We were matching capital to entrepreneurs who could use it effectively. We were creating investments that money managers needed in volatile markets.”

Shortly after his release from prison in 1993, Milken was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer and given 18 months to live.

He survived the disease and launched a foundation that channeled more than $700 million into prostate research. In 2004, he was called the “the man who changed medicine” by Fortune magazine, which noted the funding and visibility he had brought to the battle against prostate cancer.

Milken also brought his well-documented work ethic to causes other than the Prostate Cancer Foundation. His Milken Family Foundation, which he started in 1982 with his brother Lowell, has made charitable donations of more than $1.25 billion.

Thousands of teachers across the U.S. were recognized with no-strings awards of $25,000 each. In 2014, George Washington University in 2014 opened its Milken Institute School of Public Health with a gift of $50 million.

Milken also founded the Milken Institute, a think tank that promotes capitalist solutions to global challenges. It annually brings together several thousand of the world’s most successful people in business, government, entertainment, sports, arts and the sciences.

Milken has signed the Giving Pledge, an initiative by Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates that commits signatories to giving away the majority of their fortune either during during their lifetimes or when they die. Milken has an estimated net worth of $3.8 billion, according to Forbes.

In issuing the pardon, the White House said that Milken had originally sought to fight the charges brought against him — which it described as “technical offenses and regulatory violations that had never before been charged as crimes” — but pleaded guilty only in exchange for having prosecutors drop criminal charges against Lowell Milken, who worked with him at Drexel.

After Trump’s announcement, Milken issued a statement saying he had no plans to return to the securities industry. Instead, he said he and his wife, Lori, are “very grateful to the president” and “look forward to many more years of pursuing our efforts in medical research, education and public health.”

Hockett said that even if Milken wanted to reenter the securities industry, he would have to separately seek redress from the SEC, which issued the ban. And that would be hard to get unless there was a “dramatic new showing of legal error or procedural defect,” which was not likely.

“It’s hard for me to imagine Mr. Milken’s wanting to return to the industry anyway. It’s moved on since his day,” Hockett said via email. “Hard to see the point.”

Though the president’s decision concludes Milken’s campaign to get a pardon, it hasn’t washed away one lasting blemish to his reputation. As news of the pardon spread, many in the media referred to him as the “junk bond king” — a sobriquet his personal web page calls a “hackneyed epithet.”

Former Times staff writer Steve Chawkins contributed to this report.

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San Francisco — 

Google parent company Alphabet Inc. is shutting down its power-generating-kites firm Makani, the first closure of a “moonshot” project since Alphabet founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepped back from management in December.

Sundar Pichai, who took over as Alphabet chief executive, is under pressure to stem losses from the company’s Other Bets segment, which includes endeavors such as self-driving cars and internet-providing balloons. Other Bets lost $4.8 billion last year — widening from a $3.4-billion loss in 2018.

Alphabet acquired Makani in 2013 and took the kite company into its experimental X lab. Makani was developing airborne wind turbines that could be tethered to floating buoys, removing the need for the expensive ocean bed structures needed to support permanent turbines.

“It’s been a very hard choice for us,” X lab CEO Astro Teller said Tuesday. “Our estimate of the rewards for the world, the reward to Alphabet, and the risks and costs to get there … they change over time. It’s part of my job to assess that and make sure that we’re picking the best ones we can for Alphabet to spend its money on.”

Alphabet would not confirm the size of Makani, only saying it consisted of dozens of employees who the parent company hoped could be reassigned to other climate-change-related work at Alphabet. A small team is to stay on for a few months to collate Makani’s research.

Makani’s kites were designed to fly as high as 1,000 feet above the water while attached to floating buoys weighed down with anchors, instead of the full ocean platforms required to support typical offshore wind farms. It was hoped that Makani’s technology could be used in areas of the ocean too deep to set up fixed wind turbines, and where winds are strongest.

As is typical for X companies that show potential for commercialization, Makani was spun out of the lab in February last year after an undisclosed investment from Royal Dutch Shell. In August, Makani held its first test flight off the coast of Norway.

But Alphabet decided the opportunity to greatly disrupt to energy sector had begun to dwindle. Makani at first believed it could provide a competitive advantage by using its technology on land and in shallow water — as well as in deep water — but advancements in competing technologies meant that was likely no longer the case.

“That’s very sad for Makani,” Teller said. “But it’s really great for the world.”

A European Union report published in 2018 concurred with Alphabet’s assessment. “The technology still has a long way to go before it can reach commercialization,” it read, noting that challenges remained in demonstrating the reliable, autonomous operation that would make the concept viable.

Shell said it was “exploring options” to take on Makani’s technology and keep developing it. “Offshore wind has the potential to reach the large-scale generation capacity that society needs to transition to a lower-carbon energy system,” said Dorine Bosman, vice president of Shell Wind Development. “We believe that Makani remains one of the leading airborne-wind technologies in the world.”

Alphabet pointed to other climate change projects within the company, such as drone delivery firm Wing, as an indication that Alphabet is not changing its focus. Teller said investment in moonshots would remain strong under Pichai and Ruth Porat, Alphabet’s chief financial officer.

“The appetite from Sundar and from Ruth for us to continue to make smart, exciting bets about the future has, if anything, gone up,” Teller said.

“Part of the reason that they’re supportive for us to continue to do that is when something doesn’t make sense, we make the hard choices to not continue doing them,” he said. “That’s what buys the ongoing support from Alphabet.”

© The Financial Times Ltd. 2020. All rights reserved. FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd. Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.

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A seven-day surge in Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc. has lifted the stock four times above its level in December. Gains are snowballing, options traders are piling in, chatrooms are lighting up. It’s all starting to look similar to another space-age growth stock’s recent run.

Though the company is just a fraction of Tesla Inc. in terms of market value, the frenzy surrounding its shares is similar. The average daily increase in Virgin’s share price is more than 9% since Feb. 10.

Virgin Galactic options activity has kept pace with the stock’s meteoric push and may even be fueling it. As of 2:20 p.m. Tuesday in New York, call volume exceeded 360,000 contracts, which dwarfs the previous record set Friday. The stock closed, up 5.7% on Tuesday, at $30.30. The share price is up 162% for the year so far.

Derivatives that can extract even more gains from Virgin Galactic have become a favorite among retail investors, judging by activity on message boards like r/wallstreetbets. When a fresh option is written, dealers who sell it will typically hedge their exposure by buying a certain amount of the stock so as not to accumulate a short position and will tend to buy more shares in the event of a continued rally. Some traders have seized on this dynamic as evidence that their options-buying activity is sufficient to perpetuate a rally in the underlying stock.

The recent activity is reminiscent of the euphoria that overtook trading in Tesla just a few weeks ago when FOMO, or fear of missing out, trading in the electric-car manufacturer overtook Google searches. While Virgin Galactic has yet to reach that level of retail excitement, more than 103 million shares traded hands Tuesday. That dwarfs the activity seen in Tesla.

Even with the stock’s parabolic rise, bears have continued to pile in with more than 30% of shares available for trading currently sold short, according to data compiled by S3 Partners. Bets that Richard Branson’s space-tourism company company goes bust stand in stark contrast to the market’s recent realization that wagering against Elon Musk and Tesla hasn’t panned out. Roughly 15% of Tesla shares available for trading are currently short, the lowest level in at least a year, data from S3 show.

Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas offered a warning to investors chasing the rally that recent gains appear “to be driven by forces beyond fundamental factors.” Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Musk’s SpaceX as well as Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ rocket company, are racing to make space tourism a reality.

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It has been open season on Michael R. Bloomberg’s record since the billionaire businessman broke from the pack of Democratic Presidential candidates and won a place in Wednesday’s Democratic debate. Here’s a new area of concern: His record on Social Security.

Advocates for the program are expressing concern that Bloomberg has failed to utter the foursquare support for Social Security that’s a litmus test for Democrats, much less support for extending and expanding the program, as Elizabeth Warren and other candidates have advocated.

It’s true that Bloomberg’s rhetorical record on Social Security is alarming. His campaign plank on retirement security, released Sunday, has several positive elements — but some disquieting verbiage, too. And it may not be enough to erase his past attacks on the program.

Nancy Altman and Linda Benesch, Social Security Works

Of all the Democrats in the race, “Michael Bloomberg is the worst choice to debate Donald Trump on an overwhelmingly important issue: Social Security’s future,” Nancy J. Altman and Linda Benesch of the advocacy group Social Security Works observed in an op-ed Tuesday. “Bloomberg’s position on Social Security is to the right of Trump’s stated position — and widely out of step with even Republican voters, let alone Democrats.”

They charge that Bloomberg “hasn’t changed his views” about the program, which over time have included supporting an increase in the retirement age and cutting back on benefit increases. “He’s just gotten smarter about hiding them.”

Wednesday’s debate will give Bloomberg’s opponents their first change to confront him directly on his positions. They shouldn’t miss the chance to force him to be more explicit about Social Security. It may be an especially vulnerable spot for him among Democrats.

Let’s take a look.

First, the good things in Bloomberg’s platform, as of Sunday. He advocates applying a cost-of-living index for annual inflation that better reflects the living costs of seniors than the standard consumer price index used now. He’s talking about the CPI-E, which is also supported by most Social Security advocates, because it takes better account of housing and medical inflation.

Bloomberg also says he’d “examine … options” for improving benefits for surviving spouses and family caregivers, who are shortchanged in the calculations of their lifetime earnings used to set benefits. Both shortcomings disproportionately affect women. But he doesn’t offer any details.

He does offer support for several other initiatives that would clamp down on predatory practices aimed at seniors and low-income households. He would restore some initatives Trump has rolled back, such as the fiduciary rule binding brokers and insurance agents to put their clients’ interests first, raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025 and expand the earned income tax credit.

What unnerves Altman and Benesch is “what he doesn’t say.” More precisely, his use of weasel words to conceal his intentions. Bloomberg’s platform states, for example, that he’d “consider options for preserving and strengthening Social Security’s long-term finances.”

That’s phraseology, they assert, “frequently used by billionaire elites like Bloomberg as code for ‘cut Social Security to save it.’”

It’s also a bit unnerving that Bloomberg stresses “maintaining and enhancing benefits for the neediest recipients.”

Upgrading minimum benefits is part of most progressive proposals for expanding Social Security, but typically in the context of increasing benefits for everyone. The latter idea is what’s missing in Bloomberg’s plan. And that raises the specter of making Social Security more of a means-tested program, which is a formula for undermining its popular support.

Bloomberg’s past remarks about Social Security generate the most concern among progressives. In 2011, when he was mayor of New York, he compared the program to a “Ponzi scheme.” He tried to cover the remark with a joke, but the program’s advocates were listening.

The remark came during an interview with Time. Asked how the notorious conman Bernard Madoff got away with scam for so long, Bloomberg said, “Everybody just thought, where did Madoff get the idea? A cynic would say Social Security … I would never say that. But it’s exactly the same thing, isn’t it?”

No. It’s nothing of the kind.

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That same year, he explicitly supported the so-called Simpson-Bowles Commission’s recommendations on deficit reduction, which included reducing Social Security benefits.

In a 2012 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg again called for enactment of the commission’s recommendations, among them “slowing the growth of entitlement costs including Social Security.” The thrust of his essay was to decry the “class warfare” that was then exemplified by the Occupy Wall Street campaign against the 1%.

A few words about Simpson-Bowles are appropriate here. Its recommendations on Social Security and Medicare were based on gross misrepresentations of those programs, spread most enthusiastically by Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming.

After serving on the commission, Simpson went on a nationwide tear,

claiming that the program was never designed as a “retirement system” and that the original bill’s drafters deliberately set the retirement age at 65 because life expectancy in 1935, at the time of enactment, was 63. In other words, Simpson said it was designed from inception as a rip-off, which is egregiously wrong. (In fact, average life expectancy at the time was higher than 66 for everyone except newborns.) He larded his response to critics, even elderly retirees, with vitriolic and vulgar invective.

He challenged me to “find the word ‘retirement’ in your vast research, either uttered by Labor Secretary Frances Perkins or Edwin Witte, head of the Committee on Economic Security, appointed by President Roosevelt in 1934.”

I cited chapter and verse from the Congressional hearings on Social Security in 1935 and referred Simpson to the official record, which still can be found online.

In short, the Simpson-Bowles recommendations were not a star for Bloomberg to hitch his wagon to. They went nowhere in Congress.

If Bloomberg wishes to establish himself as a Democratic alternative to Donald Trump, he has to come clean on Social Security. Altman and Benesch say, “To get right on Social Security, Bloomberg must repudiate his past support for cuts … [and] pledge that he will never support cutting a single penny of current or future benefits. Unless that happens, supporters of Social Security should consider him an enemy of the program.”

That would certainly set him apart from Trump, who has signaled that he’s open to Social Security cuts and whose latest budget proposal shreds Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the nation’s keystone social safety net programs. Now is his chance.

Some monuments are movie stars. So it is with Griffith Observatory. Great cheekbones. Uncommon presence. Something in the eyes.

Indeed, if L.A. has a tickle spot, it would be here on the hill, east of the sun and west of the moon. A playful scion of scandal and great wealth and growing more stately over time, Griffith Observatory is a must-do activity for out-of-town guests. More than the ocean. More than Hollywood Boulevard or even that pricey theme park in Anaheim that you love or loathe.

A visitor can choose to get significantly smarter here or just zone out. The planetarium, in the minutes before the projection show as you lean back in that big slab of an easy chair, is one of the most meditative places in a major American city

Then the show starts, fluidly narrated by a live human being from a script with more zing and drama than what’s playing at the local multiplex.

Sit back and watch Orion in winter or how Polaris never moves, making it so significant — the star that guided hungry Bedouins across the deserts and scurvy sailors across the seas.

Gaze up at the planetarium’s ceiling and chart the paths of the kings and warriors who march the sky. You can push yourself to absorb it, as though you are getting a do-over of college astronomy. Or you can marvel over its majesty as you would a world-class orchestra.

The video also places you in your proper spot in the universe, miles from the nearest disenchanted Uber driver or belching cross-town bus. For 30 minutes, it takes you away from your petty problems. Here you are, amid the billions of stars, the snowy galaxies, the sequined ball gown that is the expanding universe.

There are worse ways to kill a winter evening.

“We are all stardust,” the planetarium narrator concludes, which I take to mean we are all stars. Who knew? We didn’t even have to audition.

The show costs $7, by the way. Everything else — the telescope viewing, the exhibits, the best breezes outside the South Bay — is free.

Indeed, if Camelot had an observatory, this is what it would look like, a mixed mutt of Art Deco, Greek Revival, Beaux Arts, Moderne. In 2002, it was once again torn apart and put back together so it wouldn’t leak anymore and the marble skin glowed once again.

To preserve the handsome shell, they dug deep under the yard to create basement galleries and an additional 200-seat theater (besides the planetarium).

Don’t miss these. Many people do. They get swept up in the main entrance — where the Tesla Coil lightning show draws gasps and the elegant Foucault pendulum demonstrates how the Earth twirls, confusing dozens of onlookers at a time.

As reference, there is the building’s main mushroom, then the two smaller bumps where the telescopes live.

The solar telescopes, to the right, flash several images down into the building, including a big porthole image into the main hall.

The other bump, to the left, is the 12-inch Zeiss, open at night. No telescope in the world has had more people look through its lens. Viewing starts around 7 p.m., although it varies when the days get longer. If it’s cloudy, you can enter and take photos, or head out to the lawn where astronomers await with a smaller set of bazookas.

The views are free too. The adjacent hiking trails? Free and among the city’s best. The Hollywood sign? You can almost kiss it.

Honestly, if you ran Griffith Observatory, what would you change? You might add a gondola for access. Parking could be easier, but you could say that about most any place.

Pro tip No. 1: Park near the Greek Theatre and take the 50-cent Dash shuttle to the observatory, avoiding congestion and the $10 per hour parking at the top.

You know, they originally wanted to perch this place at the very top of Mt. Hollywood? Architects said, yeah, that would be cool, but how would anyone get there?

So they placed it on this roomy pancake on the south slope, which makes the most of its 100-mile sight lines. Some days you can see to Pittsburgh, or so it seems. At the very least, Big Bear.

On the solstice, a brush of sunlight stripes the floor of the West Terrace. Public talks mark the occasion, as well as other astronomical milestones, such as an equinox or an eclipse.

Pro tip No. 2: A summer solstice picnic at the observatory might be L.A.’s coolest first date.

That this place even exists is somewhat of a miracle. The rich hot mess who made it all happen, Griffith J. Griffith, had already donated 3,000 acres for the park. After a visit to Mt. Wilson, the baron said, “If all mankind could look through that telescope, it would change the world.” So he proposed a public telescope for his park.

At the time, Griffith was fresh from prison for shooting his wife, and the city balked at any further dealings with a bossy, alcoholic felon. But as we know, sometimes you can bankroll your redemption. That’s what Griffith managed to do. In his will, he got what he wanted, leaving the money for the observatory and the Greek.

The observatory opened in 1935 amid the Great Depression. In all the time since, it has never been a research facility. It is used only for public enjoyment. The city runs it — yes, the same city that runs LAX; you can’t help but appreciate the differences.

“Our job is inspiration and a change in perspective,” says deputy director Mark Pine.

Best times? Sunset, naturally, as with everywhere else. Just better, amid the quail and the chaparral. You can sniff the sage in the canyons. You can watch the glossy half-smile of Santa Monica Bay.

And the lights of the city, the glowing embers of another long SoCal day, not so different from the loaded sky.

Pro tip No. 3: Weekends up here can be brutal, like a Rams game, elbow to elbow, lines that linger.

The weekdays? Entirely different, and you can walk right up to the ticket window and snag two tickets to the next show, lie back in that easy chair and ponder how in this monster of a city you can find these quiet little curtains of quiet.

At this spa of the stars, on a hill that gazes down — and up — on just about everything.

Essentials

Hours: The observatory is open noon to 10 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 10 a.m to 10 p.m. weekends, It is closed Mondays. The building, lots and nearby trails will be closed March 1 for a special event.

Waits can be an hour at the night telescope. It’s not in operation on cloudy nights, but you can still enter the chamber and look it over and snag a selfie.

Shows: There are up to 10 planetarium shows a day. The best is “Centered in the Universe,” but the observatory is adding “Signs of Life” in June, its first new show in 10 years. Planetarium tickets are available only in person the day of the show. If the line is long, try the self-serve kiosks. Children younger than 5 are allowed only at the first show of the day. Prices: $3-$7.

Parking: Notoriously tricky on weekends, it loosens up during the week and spaces are generally available near the top, for $10 an hour. Dash shuttle from the Greek Theatre costs 50 cents.

Info: Griffith Observatory, griffithobservatory.org

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index and Dow Jones industrial average fell modestly Tuesday as U.S. stocks gave up some of their solid gains from the last two weeks.

Banks and technology stocks accounted for most of the decline. The Nasdaq composite eked out a tiny gain, notching another record high.

The selling came as investors weighed the effect of the coronavirus outbreak on Apple and other major companies.

The tech giant said revenue for its current quarter will fall short of previous forecasts because production has been curtailed and consumer demand for iPhones has slowed in China. Apple’s stores there are either closed or operating on reduced hours.

The iPhone maker is among the most notable companies to warn investors that the virus will hurt its financial performance. Medical device maker Medtronic also warned Tuesday that the outbreak will affect its quarterly results.

“The longer this goes on, the greater the focus is going to be on how much is this going to impact companies like Apple, which is considered not only a bellwether in tech but a bellwether for the market overall,” said Randy Frederick, vice president of trading and derivatives at Charles Schwab.

The S&P 500 index fell 9.87 points, or 0.3%, to 3,370.29. That’s just below the all-time high it set Friday.

The Dow slid 165.89 points, or 0.6%, to 29,232.19. The Nasdaq recovered from an early slide and finished with a gain of 1.56 points, or less than 0.1%, at 9,732.74.

The Russell 2000 index of smaller-company stocks fell 4.06 points, or 0.2%, to 1,683.52.

Bond prices rose. The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 1.56% from 1.58% on Friday.

Stocks began lower Tuesday as U.S. markets reopened after the Presidents Day holiday.

As in recent weeks, traders reacted to the latest developments in the coronavirus outbreak that began in China and has since infected more than 75,000 people. Most of the cases and 2,000-plus deaths remain centered in China.

Businesses worldwide are increasingly caught in the economic fallout from the outbreak. The Beijing auto show in April, the industry’s biggest global event of the year, is being postponed indefinitely.

Technology and healthcare companies have been the most vocal about mentioning the new coronavirus in their earnings conference calls, according to FactSet.

Although Apple’s projected revenue miss took Wall Street by surprise, some analysts played down the iPhone production delay’s long-term effect on the company. In a research note Tuesday, Canaccord Genuity analyst Michael Walkley said Apple continues to perform strongly across all business lines, including iPhone 11 demand outside China.

Apple shares fell 1.8%. Medtronic slid 4%.

Despite the uncertainty over the viral outbreak, investors have been willing to buy back into the market after a dip. The S&P 500 has ended higher the last two weeks and is holding on to a 4.5% gain this month.

For the most part, investors are betting that the economic fallout from the outbreak will be limited to the first three months of this year, Frederick said. But if companies signal that they expect lingering effects on their business into the second quarter, investors could become less eager to jump back into the market.

“There are just so many people out there that think every dip is a buying opportunity, and so far, they’ve been rewarded,” Frederick said. “We’re going to see that for a while, until we have a really big downturn and people really get hurt by it. We just haven’t had that in a long time.”

Technology stocks accounted for a big slice of the selling Tuesday. Declines hit several chipmakers, which rely heavily on China for sales and supplies. Intel fell 1.7%. Broadcom slid 2.2%.

Bank shares lost ground. HSBC said it will cut 35,000 jobs and shed $100 billion in assets. Its shares dropped 5.6%. Wells Fargo slid 2.5%.

Energy stocks also fell. Schlumberger declined 2.2%.

Communication services stocks and utilities held up better than most of the market. T-Mobile US rose 3.5%, and Xcel Energy rose 1.3%.

Traders continued to assess company earnings reports. Advance Auto Parts climbed 6.2% after the auto parts supplier posted results that beat Wall Street forecasts. Conagra Brands dropped 6.1% after the food producer cut its fiscal 2020 profit and revenue forecasts, citing surprisingly weak consumption.

Among S&P 500 companies still to release their earnings, Progressive will report Wednesday and ViacomCBS will report Thursday.

Financial services company Franklin Resources jumped 6.9% after saying it is buying competitor Legg Mason for $4.5 billion. The deal will create a financial company with a combined $1.5 trillion in assets under management. Legg Mason shares leaped 24.4%.

Benchmark crude oil was unchanged at $52.02 a barrel. Brent crude oil, the international standard, rose 8 cents to $57.75 a barrel. Wholesale gasoline rose 3 cents to $1.61 a gallon. Heating oil fell 3 cents to $1.67 a gallon. Natural gas rose 14 cents to $1.98 per 1,000 cubic feet.

Gold rose $17.30 to $1,600 an ounce. Silver rose 41 cents to $18.13 an ounce. Copper was unchanged at $2.61 a pound.

COLUMBIA, S.C. — 

A 6-year-old girl who disappeared from her front yard after school was killed by a neighbor who then killed himself, authorities said Tuesday.

Faye Marie Swetlik died of asphyxiation hours after she was abducted, Lexington County Coroner Margaret Fisher told reporters Tuesday, refusing to say if she was strangled or suffocated.

Faye’s body was found nearly three days later in woods near her home and had been put there just hours earlier, Fisher said.

Between that time, investigators had spoken with the suspect. Coty Scott Taylor let them search his home a few doors down from the girl’s home. They saw nothing to suggest she was ever there, Cayce Public Safety Director Byron Snellgrove said.

Shortly after Faye’s body was found, authorities said, they were called to Taylor’s home, where he was dead on his back porch, covered in blood.

Taylor, 30, slit his own throat, Fisher said in a statement released after Tuesday’s news conference. In front of cameras, the coroner would only talk about Faye.

Fisher also refused to release any details about the condition of Faye’s body or disclose any other way she might have been injured out of respect for her family.

Snellgrove also didn’t talk about why Taylor, who had no criminal record, would have kidnapped the girl. He said last week that Taylor did not know Faye or her family.

“DNA was tested and did connect and link the residence, the deceased male and Faye to that location,” Snellgrove said.

Faye was last seen alive playing in her Cayce front yard after getting off the school bus Feb. 10. More than 200 officers searched over three days for her, knocking on every door in her neighborhood and checking every vehicle going in and out.

They knocked on Taylor’s door, too, the day before he killed himself, Snellgrove said.

“He was cooperative and gave consent to agents to look through the house. Those agents did not see anything that alerted them to believe he had knowledge or was in any involved in Faye’s disappearance at that time,” Snellgrove said.

The clue that cracked the case came from a trash can. Investigators followed a trash truck going around the neighborhood Thursday and sifted through every can as it was emptied. In Taylor’s trash, Snellgrove said, they found a rain boot matching one Faye was wearing and a ladle full of dirt.

Snellgrove said he ordered a search near the area and personally found the girl’s body, which had been “moved in shadow of the night.”

Taylor had a roommate who was not home much while Faye was missing, said Snellgrove, adding the roommate appeared to know nothing about the abduction.

“It appears [Taylor] is the sole perpetrator of the crime,” Snellgrove said.

Faye’s disappearance shocked Cayce, a town of about 13,000 just west of Columbia, the state capital. Several prayer vigils were held while she was missing and after her body was found.

More than 100 people came out in pouring rain for a candlelight vigil Tuesday evening at Cayce City Hall. Many wiped away tears as Snellgrove lit the first candle and city council members passed the flame around.

Snellgrove appeared to choke up while announcing the girl’s death just hours after finding her body.

“This was not just an investigation or a case to us. Faye Swetlik quickly grabbed all of our hearts,” Snellgrove said Tuesday.

Faye had started school at Springdale Elementary in August and made an immediate impact, bounding into school for breakfast and finding friends, Principal Hope Vrana said at the vigil.

“Everyone quickly grew to love her smile, her joyful spirit and her very kind heart,” Vrana said.

A public memorial for Faye will be held at 7 p.m. Friday at Trinity Baptist Church in Cayce.

Fisher said her heart broke for the girl’s family, who lost their child as she played in her front yard.

“You and Faye will remain in my heart forever,” the coroner said.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — 

A small instrument inside the drones that targeted the heart of Saudi Arabia’s oil industry and those in the arsenal of Yemen’s Houthi rebels matches components recovered in downed Iranian drones in Afghanistan and Iraq, two reports say.

These gyroscopes have only been found inside drones manufactured by Iran, Conflict Armament Research said in a report released on Wednesday. That follows a recently released report from the United Nations, saying its experts saw a similar gyroscope from an Iranian drone obtained by the U.S. military in Afghanistan, as well as in a shipment of cruise missiles seized in the Arabian Sea bound for Yemen.

The discovery further ties Iran to an attack that briefly halved Saudi Arabia’s oil output and saw energy prices spike by a degree unseen since the 1991 Gulf War. It also ties Iran to the arming of the rebel Houthis in Yemen’s long civil war. Iran denies it had a hand in that assault but has increasingly promoted its influence over the Houthis and launched a ballistic missile attack on American troops in Iraq after a U.S. drone strike killed a top Iranian general in Baghdad last month.

“This gyroscope … we’ve seen it now enough times in Iranian-manufactured material to be able to confidently say that the presence of it in a Houthi-produced item suggests that the material was supplied from Iran,” Jonah Leff of Conflict Armament Research told the Associated Press.

Iran’s mission to the U.N. declined to immediately respond to queries from the AP.

Media officials from the rebel Houthis, who hold Yemen’s capital, Sana, and have been battling a Saudi-led coalition since March 2015, declined an interview request. A U.N. Security Council resolution prohibits arms transfers to the Houthis.

A gyroscope is a device that helps orient and guide a drone or missile to its target. The gyroscopes in question bear no manufacturer’s name and come in at least two versions labeled V9 and V10, according to the reports. Their four-digit serial numbers also appear sequential, suggesting the same manufacturer had built all of those found.

The Houthis’ Qasef-1 drone carries the V10 gyroscope, which is “identical” to one found in an Iranian-made Ababil-3 drone, which Islamic State group fighters reportedly recovered in Iraq, Conflict Armament Research said. Weapons experts found the V9 version of the gyroscope in drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles, used in the September attack on Abqaiq, home of a crucial oil processing facility for Saudi Arabia, the U.N. report said.

“According to UAV experts familiar with this technology, such vertical gyroscopes have not been observed in any UAVs other than those manufactured by Iran,” Conflict Armament Research said in its report, which was funded by the European Union and the governments of Germany and the United Arab Emirates.

The U.N. report simply said that “the manufacturer of the gyroscope remains unknown.” However, it noted finding similar V10 gyroscopes “among the debris of both Samad and Qasef UAVs, which have been used by the Houthi forces.”

The U.N. also said its experts saw a V9 gyroscope in Washington at a military display showing an Iranian Shahed-123 that American officials say they recovered in Afghanistan in October 2016 after it crash-landed.

Images of the gyroscopes match those in the Conflict Armament Research report. A similar gyroscope could be seen inside a cruise missile seized by the U.S. Navy in a November raid on a shipping boat in the Arabian Sea. A computer terminal also seized with the missiles, likely used with the weapons, bore Farsi characters on its keyboard.

The U.S. and the Saudi-led coalition have long said that Iran supplies weapons to the Houthis, ranging from assault rifles to the ballistic missiles fired into the kingdom. The U.S. Navy announced a new weapons cache found aboard a shipping boat this month, but it wasn’t clear if the same gyroscopes were inside missiles recovered in this find.

Drones used by the Houthis have done everything including crashing into Patriot missile batteries and exploding overhead to shower deadly shrapnel on targets. An exploding Houthi drone in a January 2019 attack on a military parade near Aden killed at least six people, including the commander of military intelligence for Yemen’s internationally recognized government.

Iran, in turn, has long denied arming the Houthis, but that veil slowly lifted after the January U.S. drone strike killed Iranian Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem Suleimani, whose expeditionary Quds Force led Iran’s work with allied proxy forces in Yemen and elsewhere. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh of the Guard’s aerospace program recently gave a speech in front of a Houthi flag, as well as those of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, Hamas and others, in an effort to project Iran’s power.

But previously, Iran’s murky arming of militant groups gave it plausible deniability and an ability to strike at opponents without being directly blamed, analysts say. While the wider confrontation with the U.S. since President Trump pulled out of Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers has seen Tehran’s military claim that attacks were launched, other claims still could come from Tehran-allied militants.

That makes tracing weapons important, Leff said. The Conflict Armament Research report also said some components used in Houthi drones had been seen in homemade explosives recovered on the island nation of Bahrain as well.

“For them to line up with many of the components that we’re seeing in these UAVs for us suggests that there are some well-established supply lines,” he said. “There’s another research question that would be drilling down to, you know, who are the parties involved in actually trafficking these items into Yemen. That we have less information on.”

MANILA  — 

A Utah woman charged with human trafficking for allegedly attempting to smuggle a 6-day-old baby out of the Philippines inside a sling bag was arrested on an additional count of kidnapping, authorities said.

Jennifer Talbot, who was out on bail while facing the human trafficking charge, was presented to reporters in Manila on Wednesday by officials from the National Bureau of Investigation, a government anti-crime investigative agency. Talbot wore an orange shirt and a mask, with her left arm in a sling.

She pulled down her mask and said, “I object to this press conference without my attorney and the embassy present.”

Talbot had planned to board a Delta Air Lines flight to the United States with the baby on Sept. 4, according to prosecutors. After discovering the baby, airline staff called immigration personnel, who arrested Talbot at the airport. The baby was turned over to government welfare personnel.

The prosecutors said Talbot presented an affidavit at the airport, allegedly from the baby’s mother giving consent for the newborn to travel to the U.S., but it had not been signed by the mother.

Officials said no government travel approval had been issued for the baby, prompting them to file human trafficking charges last year against Talbot. Talbot also violated at least two other laws, kidnapping and illegal detention, the prosecutors said.

Talbot was served with an arrest warrant for kidnapping on Monday while she was attending a court hearing related to the trafficking charge. There is no bail available for kidnapping.

An initial hearing on the kidnapping charge is scheduled on March 12.

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