Free Republic

San Jose -- A Nevada couple who cooked up a scheme to plant a severed finger in a bowl of Wendy's chili to extort money from the fast food chain were sentenced Wednesday to lengthy prison terms. Anna Ayala, 40, who said she bit into the digit, was sentenced to nine years in state prison. Her husband, Jaime Plascencia, 44, who supplied the finger, was ordered locked up for more than a dozen years. The pair pleaded guilty Sept. 9 in Santa Clara County Superior Court to two felony charges arising from the chili-finger scam: conspiracy to file a false...

Call me shallow, but I do love the chili finger story. I think the chili finger story would make a very good movie, perhaps several movies -- a quickie docudrama starring Mariska Hargitay, a comedy starring Jennifer Aniston, and then, in the fullness of time, a sensitive art film starring Robin Wright Penn, with Paul Giamatti as the guy who sold his finger. See. That's the part I like. According to police reports, a guy named Brian Rossiter lost his finger when the lift on a truck severed it. He kept the finger, perhaps in the hope that it could...

A Culver City woman said Wednesday that a secondhand Koran she ordered through a book dealer working with Amazon.com contained anti-Islamic hate messages, including profanity and "Death to all Muslims!" Azza Basarudin, a 30-year-old UCLA graduate student, said Amazon apologized, sent a new book and offered her a refund and gift certificate. But she and the Muslim Public Affairs Council called on the online bookseller to do more, including issuing a public condemnation of anti-Muslim hate speech and cutting commercial ties with the Pennsylvania-based book dealer that sent the Koran. Holding up the book to display the messages at a...