CNN 2011-05-17

I'm Carl Azuz, and today on CNN Student News, we're gonna be talking about something that won't happen until November 6th... of 2012! But we start things off down in Louisiana.

Officials facing the threat of massive flooding there have opened several gates on the Morganza Spillway. A spillway is something that goes over or around a dam. It's a safety feature. When too much water builds up around the dam, the spillway's gates can be opened to let some of that water through.

This is what the Morganza Spillway looks like normally: gates closed, nothing coming through. But with floodwaters from the Mississippi River rushing in, engineers opened up some of the spillway's gates for the first time in nearly 40 years. That's what you see here: water barreling through the gate. The Morganza Spillway has 125 total gates. Officials plan to open up to one-fourth of those.

Opening the gates should divert floodwaters away from major cities, like Baton 1 Rouge 2 and New Orleans, Louisiana. But it will send water toward homes and farmland in other parts of the state. People who live there -- many of whom have had to evacuate 3 their homes -- are preparing for devastation 4.

It's worse than we thought. It's really worse than we thought. We thought maybe we might have water in our yard. Instead, this is going to come into our home. It's going to take everything we have got.

The next U.S. presidential election is more than 500 days away. Might sound like the distant future, but there's a lot that happens between now and then. And since that process is already underway, we're going to break some of it down for you today.

Ultimately, one candidate from each party will face off in the general election. That's on November 6th, 2012. Before that, candidates have to win their party's nomination 5. That's what the primary elections help decide. There are lots of political parties out there. The Green Party, the Libertarian Party. We're going to look at the two biggest parties: the Democrats 6 and Republicans.

On the Democratic side, President Obama is an incumbent 7 candidate. He's running for re-election to the office he already holds. He announced his campaign last month.

The Republican side has a field of candidates. Some of them, like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, U.S. Representative Ron Paul, and former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, have announced their plans to run for president. Others have formed what are called exploratory committees. They haven't officially announced their candidacy, but they're looking pretty seriously at the possibilities. Lot of steps to go through between now and election day. We'll take you through it as campaign season rolls along