Rat Fink

Though they cater to a clientele that's officially communist, China's restaurateurs are canny practitioners of free-market competition. Price wars, negative advertisingvirtually anything goes. But in the eastern Chinese city of Tangshan, capitalism has morphed into mass murder. Someone sprinkled rat poison on breakfast treats served at the Heshengyuan Soy Milk snack shop in Tangshan, killing at least 40 people and sickening 300 more. The alleged culprit, arrested by local police, is a rival whose eatery suffered because the Heshengyuan snack shop was more popular. Such culinary skulduggery isn't new: earlier this summer the owner of a rice-noodle shop in the southern...