Backlash

PARIS -- Washington and the European capitals are all preoccupied with China's economic growth and expanding international influence and activities, taken as evidence that in the not-too-distant future China will become a superpower. Washington thinks about China's becoming a military as well as economic superpower. The Europeans think about trade and economic competition. Both underestimate what it takes to become a modern industrial superpower. It requires a very high level of autonomous technological capacity, to begin with, as well as sophisticated and innovative industry to make use of it - both of which China today lacks.

For Korean-Americans, the realization of a shared ethnicity with Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho has left many trying to untangle a complex web of emotions. Shock that someone could commit such a horrific act of violence. Anguish for the victims. And the unfounded fear - common among virtually any ethnic minority - that the actions of one might taint the whole, says Gie Kim, president of the Washington chapter of the Korean American Coalition. "Everyone I talked to - black, Jewish, Korean, whatever - we were all hoping it wasn't one of us," she said.

DETROIT -- Toyota Motor Corp. is bracing for possible political and consumer backlash caused by its rapid U.S. growth, according to an internal report obtained by the Detroit Free Press. Toyota executives have publicly downplayed the importance of predictions that the Japan-based company will pass General Motors Corp. this year as the world's largest automaker. But the Toyota report says the company could face criticism because its U.S. sales are increasing while Detroit's automakers are losing sales and closing plants.

Every so often, the national body politic awakens from its slumber, yawns, stretches, surveys the landscape in horror and swats aside the prevailing power structure. That's what happened in unusually high turnout congressional elections yesterday that apparently returned control of the House to the Democrats for the first time since a similar swat-out in 1994, and at least narrowed the GOP Senate majority to a sliver. Widespread opposition to the Iraq war, disgruntlement about an economy that rewards some but leaves many others out, and disgust at former Republican revolutionaries who abandoned their principles of fiscal restraint and seemed oblivious to corruption and abuse of power within their ranks - all took a mighty toll on the party in power.

BOSTON -- So, once more, we have celebrated Aug. 26, the anniversary of the passage of women's suffrage, in our own special way. Our one-woman jury gathers in the shadow of our foremothers to dispense the much-coveted Equal Rites Awards to those who have done their best over the past year to set back the cause of women. The envelopes, please. We begin with The Taliban Wannabe Prize, once named for the copycats working to keep women under (literal) wraps. This year the award is bound to, alas ... Afghanistan.

Sure you've heard of Nikolai Fraiture's band. In 2001, he and his four New York buddies -- guitarist Nick Valensi, vocalist Julian Casablancas, guitarist Albert Hammond Jr. and drummer Fabrizio Moretti -- were The Most Talked-About group that year. Collectively known as the Strokes, they were brazenly called "the saviors of rock" by some critics. The notorious hype machine better known as the British press led the bandwagon with a fervor nearly matching that behind Oasis in the early '90s.

The Dixie Chicks could have turned tail. They could have been ready, ready, ready, ready to run back to their mega-platinum, chart-topping ways, their pickin'-and-a-grinnin', their sassy songs of sweetness and light. America -- especially the Rushies and the Robertson-religious red-staters who have been calling for their pretty little heads for years -- loves a good apology. Well, the Dixie Chicks offer no apologies on their new album, Taking the Long Way. Natalie Maines, Martie Maguire and Emily Robison have chosen to stand their ground.

At a time when executives routinely score payouts worth tens of millions of dollars for selling a company, Mercantile Bankshares Corp. chief Edward J. "Ned" Kelly III could have bargained for a bigger potential "golden parachute" when his contract was up for renewal this year. But he didn't. Instead he surprised board members by suggesting they drop provisions in his contract that would have brought him a $9 million windfall when and if the Baltimore bank were sold. In the world of executive compensation, where exit packages for corporate America have become a lightning rod for shareholders and corporate ethicists, this might be the equivalent of man-bites-dog.

WASHINGTON -- Bowing to extreme public and political pressure, a United Arab Emirates company said yesterday that it would give up its management stake in U.S. seaports, including Baltimore's, rather than continue to fight what increasingly appeared to be a lost battle. For more than three weeks, the pending sale of British-owned Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Co. to state-owned Dubai Ports World has generated controversy, splitting many congressional Republicans - especially in the House of Representatives - from President Bush, who had said repeatedly that he supported the deal.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush spent the past four years framing security as his defining issue and wielding it against Democrats as a winning theme for his party. Now, as Bush finds himself facing a bipartisan backlash over his administration's approval of a deal allowing a United Arab Emirates company to manage six major U.S. ports, the president seems to have landed on the losing side of his own game. The virulence of the reaction to the deal, criticized by top Republicans and Democrats in Congress and elsewhere, is in large part a product of Bush's success at hammering his opponents as weak on national security, say strategists and analysts.