* The Mousavi camp announced that the candidate's brother-in-law has been detained for over a month. Mousavi's wife, Zahra Rahnavard, "said she and other Iranians would not believe any 'confessions by force' obtained from her brother."

* The son of Mohsen Ruholamini, an adviser to Mohsen Rezai (the other, more conservative, candidate against Ahmadinejad), has died in Evin prison. Ruholamini's son, like Mousavi's brother-in-law, was detained in the wake of the election demonstrations.

* At Friday prayers, a pro-Khamenei cleric conflated planning demonstrations against Khamenei's government with plotting to harm Khamenei (from the Washington Post):

"We know of some insulting private meetings. We know about the plots against the leader but you (who hold these meetings) should know that you will not be able to stand against the people," Ahmad Khatami told Friday prayer worshippers.

* The Tehran Times on Clinton on Iran:

The secretary of state repeated her comments about a defense umbrella over the Persian Gulf region which has alarmed Israel. She described it as a restatement of policy that is rooted in bilateral relationships with countries in the region.

Despite remarks by Clinton, Arab states consider Israel as the only threat to regional peace which refuses to sign the NPT and is the only nuclear-armed country in the region.

Analysts interpret the defense umbrella proposal by Clinton as a new attempt by Washington to sell more weapons to rich Arab states.

* Also from the Tehran Times—Khatami has commanded Ahmadinejad to dump his vice presidential choice for not being bellicose enough:

Ahmadinejad issued a decree on July 18 appointing former Cultural Heritage, Tourism, and Handicrafts Organization director Esfandiar Rahim-Mashaii as his new first vice president.

In 2008, Rahim-Mashaii said, “Iran is a friend of the Israeli people,” in stark contrast to Iran’s stance on the Zionist regime, and the Supreme Leader criticized him for his remarks.

However, even though Ayatollah Khamenei has ordered the president to dismiss Rahim-Mashaii from the post of vice president, he is still in office.

(CNN reported that Rahim-Mashaii is also in trouble for "not leaving an area in Turkey where female dancers were performing.")

* Another week, another fatal jetliner crash. (This week's death toll is 30; last week's was over 160.) Won't some cleric interpret the disasters as a sign from God that the nation is out of joint and that things need to change, the way our evangelical clerics do?

* And from current.com (the people who brought you Target: Women), a brief documentary about hanging out with the Basij. Sample quote: "We don't want people to think like we do... We don't want people under the control of anything other than God."

Another documentary, posted by Andrew Sullivan, that wonders why the Iranian regime executes homosexuals but explicitly endorses sex-change operations. According to the doc, transsexual operations in Iran are seven times more common than they are in Europe: