Carnival tainted by shootings ahead of main parades

After two days of raucous street parties engulfing the nation, the Rio carnival focus Sunday was on the city's elite schools as they prepared to strut their stuff at the city's sambadrome.
Over the next two nights, 12 Special Group schools, each comprising some 5,000 participants wearing dazzlingly exotic outfits exposing maximum flesh, will sashay along the 720-meter (yard) Sapucai Avenue in the city center.
An anticipated crowd of more than 70,000, from great-grandmothers to babes in arms will sway and cheer on their favorite school in a parade lasting into the early hours, as Rio residents forego their beds and cast off their cares.
The ugly side of life intruded, however, on the unbridled joy after ten people were hurt in an overnight shooting in the tourist magnet of Paraty, west of Rio, Brazil's CBN radio reported.
Another man was injured in a separate shooting in the northern city of Salvador, which hosts one of Brazil's most spectacular carnivals.
In Rio, the urban violence that so often scars the life of the city of more than six million has faded into the distance, at least for five days of festivities which began Friday and drew more than a million people Saturday to street parties known as 'blocos'.
Even so, 15,000 police have been deployed -- just in case emotions boil over.
The emblematic Cordao da Bola Preto had hoped to attract as many as two million people to its traditional shindig in central Rio to kick off the day's proceedings.
But Globo newspaper reported Sunday that only around one million attended with the venue shifted slightly owing to pre-Olympic roadworks.
"I'm not sure the figures are right -- but in recent years carnival has grown so much maybe there's nowhere else for it to go," Luiz Benevides, 39 and a drummer with a top bloco playing samba-flavor Beatles songs, told AFP.
"Street parties are the best thing that could ever happen to carnival. I have stopped watching the main parades as they are now so commercialized -- though maybe the street versions will go the same way."
After Sunday and Monday night's elite parades, the jurors will elect the winners ahead of next Saturday's Parade of Champions which brings a final curtain down on proceedings.
A panel of judges will run the rule over the dancers and massed ranks of percussionists as well as their spectacular floats before determining who takes the crown worn currently by the Unidos da Tijuca school.       
The main parades at the Oscar Niemeyer-designed Sambodromo are the culmination of months of preparations.
"The excitement builds and builds. Then it's your school's turn to go and there you are, under the lights, the noise. It's an indescribable feeling," Megumi Kudo, solo dancer with the Salgueiro elite school, told AFP.
The sweltering heat means the parades, broadcast live on television in an all-night spectacular, do not start until 2300 GMT. The last school is not scheduled to finish until around 4 a.m. (0600 GMT), leaving residents of the "Marvelous City" bleary eyed.
The first record of carnival celebrations dates back to 1723 -- but the first samba school was not formed until 1928.
Recent years have seen street groups swell to more than 400, Many draw just a few hundred people but others, such as the Cordao da Bola Preta, attract millions.
Other cities, notably Sao Paulo, with its own Anhembi sambadrome a major draw in Brazil's business hub, and the northeastern cities of Salvador and Recife, are also engaged in their own spectacular festivities.
This year's carnival comes after a difficult year for Brazil, whose economy is facing zero growth this year while flagship oil firm Petrobras is mired in a huge corruption scandal.