Scott Air Force Base celebrates Earth Day

Scott Air Force Base is celebrating ‪#EarthDay‬ with some special events. Scott Elementary School students hand-painted bags made of recycled material on Thursday. An Electronic Recycling and Paper Shredding event was held on Wednesday. Scott Air Force Base is dedicated to building a cleaner, greener installation by highlighting energy and water conservation initiatives and successes, according to the base Facebook page.

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House lawmakers are promising a legislative fix in coming days to prevent military widows from losing thousands of dollars in federal assistance checks next year, according to Army Times.

Rep. Joe Heck, R-Nev., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee’s personnel panel, said he anticipates next week’s final draft of the annual defense authorization bill will include an extension of the Special Survivor Indemnity Allowance, a monthly payout to military widows and widowers.

“We’re very close. It has to be done,” he told reporters Wednesday. “I believe we’ll find an offset.”

Without an extension, the SSIA is scheduled to expire in October 2017. That would cost recipients up to $310 a month, a sizable sum for surviving spouses living off a single income.

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CNN is reporting that President Barack Obama is embarking on a global swing Tuesday to encourage partners in the Gulf and Europe to scale-up the fight against ISIS.

But the trip comes amidst revived attention to Saudi Arabia's perceived role in the September 11 attacks and tensions between Washington and Riyadh over Iran, while domestic E.U. concerns distract European leaders.

And then there's America's own domestic diversion: the acrimonious presidential race battle back home, which foreign allies are monitoring intently and with varying levels of trepidation.

Paying what will likely be his final official visits to Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom and Germany, Obama hopes to extract far greater commitments in the terror fight. But it is unclear whether the climate in each location will allow for major breakthroughs in a war against ISIS that he's vowed to intensify during his final months in office.

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Two former Central Intelligence Agency contractors, Bruce Jessen and James E. Mitchell, will face a federal court hearing Friday in Spokane, Wash., in a lawsuit that could shine a light onto one of the CIA's darkest chapters, its use of torture. The Justice Department hasn't tried to block the suit on security grounds, as it has in previous cases, according to Military.com.

Between 2002 to 2008, harsh interrogation techniques developed and supervised by Jessen and Mitchell, both former Air Force psychologists, were used against 39 captives in CIA efforts to collect intelligence about al-Qaida operations and future attacks.

In the suit, lawyers representing Rahman's family and two other former CIA detainees allege that the psychologists promoted and taught torture tactics to the CIA based on 1960s experiments involving dogs and an unproven theory called "learned helplessness."

This story was originally published April 22, 2016 at 11:47 AM with the headline "Scott Air Force Base celebrates Earth Day."