News

LONDON — The case of an Iranian woman who faces death by stoning is drawing international outrage after her lawyer's blog posts sparked a global campaign to save her life.

Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani's face, framed in a black chador, stared from the front page of The Times of London on Thursday, while The Guardian newspaper has carried an interview with Ashtiani's children — 22-year-old Sajad and 17-year-old Farideh — who described the sentence as a nightmare. Protests are planned in front of the Iranian Embassy over the weekend.

Stoning is a "medieval punishment which has no role in the modern world," British Foreign Secretary William Hague told reporters Thursday. "If the punishment is carried out, it will disgust and appall the watching world," Hague said in a media conference with Turkey's foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu in London.

He appealed to Tehran to halt the planned execution.

Celebrities including Colin Firth, Emma Thompson, and Robert Redford have already signed on to the campaign to push for her release, according to The Times, which also quoted U.S. Senator John Kerry and Howard Berman, the chairman of the House of Representatives' Foreign Affairs Committee, as expressing their disgust at the sentence.

Even Lindsay Lohan publicized the case, becoming one of hundreds of Twitter users rallying the online world to Ashtiani's defense.

Under Iran's Islamic laws, adultery is the only... >>>