2003 Year

MY passport photo shows an ordinary, middle-aged woman, but it's the rest of that document, with stamps from seemingly everywhere on extra pages inserted to accommodate them, that singles me out as someone who has had the good fortune to make her livelihood by traveling the world. Travel -- already complex as a consequence of 9/11 -- became even more so this year with the invasion of Iraq, a volatile economy and the SARS outbreak. Large parts of the world suddenly seemed off-limits.

Many of the biggest stories this year in the world of religion had to do with topics that might otherwise seem far from the pulpit: sex, war, court decisions and movies. The year 2003 produced the ordination of an openly gay Episcopal bishop, debate over the morality of the Iraqi war, continuing fallout from the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church and the placement -- and removal -- of a Ten Commandments display in an Alabama courthouse.

The year 2003 proved to be one where the famous became the accused, an ex-New York police commissioner took the spotlight at the LAPD and homicides in the City of Angels dropped by nearly a quarter. All this while an FBI probe into eavesdropping by Hollywood's top private investigator became the buzz of Tinseltown.

For Ed Gann, 2002 was a cornucopia. Eighth in the country among owners, Gann raced horses that earned $4 million and averaged an amazing $47,241 every time they went to the track. Then came the tough act that nobody guessed would follow. A few curtain calls, please. In 2003, Gann's horses have run 78 times, won 14 graded races and earned $5.7 million, which ranks the 80-year-old Rancho Santa Fe entrepreneur fourth nationally.

In a year of rising housing costs, Los Angeles lawmakers and advocates pushed through measures to help tenants and homeowners keep roofs over their heads. The effort, and its success, signal the growing realization of the difficulties that poor and moderate-income families face in their attempts to find affordable housing. Los Angeles has more renters than any other U.S. city except New York, and tenant groups tried to make lawmakers aware of their numbers in 2003.

Even without a new Madonna movie, it was another embarrassing year for Hollywood. What else could you say about a year in which a Los Angeles Police Department captain was charged with peddling bootleg DVDs, Britney Spears posed on the cover of Entertainment Weekly wearing a white bustier with a red cabala bracelet and a sizable contingent of Hollywood celebs was exposed after they'd raked in free jewelry and jet trips for appearing at charity fundraisers?

The American soldier, who bears the duty of "living with and dying for a country's most fateful decisions," was named Sunday as Time magazine's Person of the Year. The choice represents the 1.4 million men and women who make up the U.S. military, which led the invasion of Iraq nine months ago and this month captured deposed leader Saddam Hussein. About 130,000 U.S. troops remain in Iraq.

Hip-hop and mainstream pop might dominate the sales charts these days, but with the exception of OutKast, neither genre registered strongly with The Times' 18 pop music contributors. Their votes went mainly to the new garage-rock generation represented by the White Stripes and Raveonettes and to the singer-songwriter side of the alt-rock spectrum. Albums are awarded 10 points for a first-place vote, nine points for second, etc. *--* Artist Album Label Pts. No. 1st 1.

The artists whose faces appear in this gallery of portraits, 10 from among the hundreds featured in these pages over the past year, are at disparate points in their evolution. A budding starlet. A musician from the streets. A band reconnecting. A jazz singer, beginning to soar. What's in their faces? Hope, humor, testiness -- even transcendence. Eyes as windows. Glimpses, perhaps, of souls.

What were they thinking? Or were they thinking at all? Those may be the questions by which we will best recall this year's major events in financial markets. Wall Street often exists in its own special reality, but even by that standard 2003 had some particularly mysterious turns. Here are some of them: * What was up with the Federal Reserve's deflation talk? The central bank has spent most of its 90-year existence fighting inflation, real and imagined.