CNN news 2013-12-22 加文本

cnn news 2013-12-22

CARL AZUZ, cnn ANCHOR: Welcome to your Tuesday edition of cnn STUDENT NEWS. Hope you`re all doing well as the year winds down and exam crop up. We`re starting today in Gaza. You`ve heard us mention this region of the Middle East before, or often in the contest of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But further complicating life in the area, severe flooding. It started with a very rare snowstorm, the first there in decades, but then rain and rising waters knocked out power. That caused problems for medical care and city services, delays in deliveries of much needed fuel. And that`s just its toll on infrastructure.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: In a place already blighted and bleak from years of war and a lack of resources, a winter storm in pushing people to the brink. In some of the tightly women neighborhoods, several days of torrential rain have created rivers where there should be roads. The Hamas government says more than 5,000 people have been forced from their homes in Gaza. Ummiyad (ph) and her six children fled to an overcrowded shelter. They had no choice but to abandon the room they all slept in and leave behind everything they had.

She said, she came here because her house was destroyed. The roof fell in, and water soaked the mattresses and blankets. There was no way to salvage things and dry out. A lone power plant was shut off last month causing 12 hour blackouts due to a fuel shortage.

On a tour of the destruction brought by the winter storm a Hamas minister gets an earful as he approaches the farmer.

"I might freeze to death," the farmer yells. The farmer is distraught because the storm has flooded his field and frozen his crops, which means he will suffer a long, difficult year, not just a hard winter. He says he`s totally ruined, there is nothing left, not the greenhouse nor his field of peas, carrots, cucumbers and potatoes. It`s all completely destroyed, he tells us.

Here, the blame game is an endless stream of slights (ph) Hamas lays at Israel`s feet. But the blame goes both ways. An Israeli-Egyptian blockade that Israel says then placed to curb the flow of weapons into Gaza is also slowing down the import of things such as fuel and building supplies. On Friday, Israel opened the main crossing to allow in fuel and water pumps to help alleviate the flooding.

According to the U.N. agency there, the damage from the flood has created disastrous zones in parts of Gaza, in the place that is always lacking more help can`t come soon enough.

AZUZ: The U.S. National Security Agency has made international headlines this year. It started when a former NSA worker named Edward Snowden leaked classified information. Part of it indicated that the NSA had collected billions of phone and email records of American citizens. Well, a federal judge ruled Monday that the NSA`s collection of American phone records is unconstitutional. That it was likely a violation of privacy right. The rulings in favor of four plaintiffs suing the government, but it`s limited only to those four, not everyone whose phone records might have been collected. This ruling could open the door to more legal challenges, though. The U.S. Justice Department is studying the ruling. It says the NSA spy program protected the privacy of American citizens.