Iran is facing severe economic pressure due to U.S. sanctions, yet recent reports indicate that the Islamic Republic is still investing significant resources in building up attack capabilities throughout the Middle East, with a new focus on Iraq.
According to the London-based Arabic daily Asharq Al-Awsat, Israel struck two Iranian military sites this month in Iraq. The report, citing Western diplomatic sources, said Israeli stealth F-35 jets hit an Iranian rocket depot northeast of Baghdad on July 19, and on July 28, a base in Iraq that lies just 80 kilometers from the Iranian border in an airstrike. That base reportedly contained a shipment of Iranian ballistic missiles, as well as Iranian “advisers,” the report stated.

For the second night in a row, Democrats hit the debate stage in Detroit and the two frontrunners took the brunt of incoming fire.
WATCH:

The fine print on the settlement for the Equifax hack ensured that it would not be simple.
The company agreed to offer people 10 years of free credit monitoring or up to $125 if they were among the 147 million Americans whose data was stolen in 2017.
But there was a catch. Due to the fact that the pool allotted for $125 payouts is capped at $31 million, there was always a risk that the payout would amount to less than that if demand was high.
And on Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission announced that the payout was likely to be “nowhere near” that amount after more than 4 million people visited the settlement site in the last week.

Wednesday night completed the second Democratic debate of the 2020 election, with Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kamala Harris of California and former vice president Joe Biden as the feature candidates. None of them turned in a resounding performance. Below are some winners and losers.
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Winners

The Trump administration is expected to extend another round of temporary waivers on Thursday to permit countries part of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal to conduct civil nuclear projects with the regime, despite pressure from US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, US National Security Advisor John Bolton and Iran hawks on Capitol Hill.
The Washington Post and Politico first reported the expected announcement.
According to the Post, US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin convinced Trump that if the sanctions weren’t waived, the United States would be required to sanction European, Chinese and Russian companies involved in Iran’s nuclear projects.

Two California professors created seesaws at the United States-Mexico border wall to allow children in both countries to play with each other.
Ronald Rael, an architecture professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Virginia San Fratello, an assistant professor at San José State University in California, came up with the idea for a “Teetertotter Wall” in 2009.
In one video posted to Rael’s Instagram page, several children are seen happily bouncing up and down on the bright pink seesaws. Another video shows people waving to children in Ciudad Juárez. Watch the full video above.

An Israeli company announced on Wednesday that it had developed a highly-effective vaccine against radiation poisoning.
The Israeli news site Mako reported that the Haifa-based company Pluristem Therapeutics made the announcement together with the US Department of Defense.
The company said that the vaccine showed extremely-improved survival rates among animals subjected to high levels of radiation.
Use of the vaccine increased survival rates by 74 percent, the company stated, compared to only four percent in the control group.
The vaccine, called PLX-R18, involves the injection of placental cells into the subjects 24 hours before radiation exposure and 72 hours after.

A senior commander of Iran’s Quds Force, Abu Alfazl Sarabian, was killed in Iraq in an attack by “Israel and the United States” on July 19, 2019, according to Iran’s Young Journalists Club news agency. A funeral service was held in Tehran before Sarabian’s body was returned for burial in his hometown of Kermanshah.
The July 19 attack targeted the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Force (Hashd al-Shaab) in Armeli in the Salah a-Din governorate of Iraq, north of Baghdad. Iraqi sources said Sarabian was killed as a result of an explosion in a storage area for solid fuel for missiles.
The announcement by Iran of the death of an IRGC officer in an “Israeli-American” attack on an Iraqi army base may raise regional tensions.

Jordan’s King Abdullah and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi met in Cairo just days before the arrival of an U.S. team in the region to discuss the Trump administration’s proposed Mideast peace plan.
According to former head of the Jordanian Parliament Foreign Affairs Committee Bassam al-Manaseer as quoted by Ynet, the meeting was an effort to establish a united stance against the “deal of the century” plan.
“[Amman] is under huge pressure by the United States, Saudi Arabia, and the [United Arab Emirates] to accept the American project,” al-Manaseer said. “Basically [King Abdullah] is trying to [coordinate his] position with [that of] another Arab [nation] that refuses the accord.”