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The kaleidoscopic colors of Carnival festivities for Mardi Gras culminate in the US tomorrow. Brazil's Carnival season is in full swing until this weekend. At the Sambodrome in Rio de Janeiro, the samba itself was in the spotlight, with dancers and drummers synchronized in a massive competition hoping to be in the featured special group next year.
It was a very different scene in another part of Brazil, where a traditional giant rooster presided over festivities. Not to be outdone, revelers at this Brazilian local continued a tradition that started in 1986 when some teenagers decided to play in the mud. If your tastes are more floral, you can travel 3,000 miles Northwest to Colombia's Caribbean coast, where a Carnival event called the Battle of the Flowers got things rolling in Barranquilla. Attendees describe the atmosphere here with words like joy, peace, flavor, charisma, and happiness.
Hi, I'm Carl Azuz for the World from A to Z. Always good to see you. As we produced this show last night, there were more than 100 wildfires burning across the US state of South Carolina. The state's forestry commission said the disaster had consumed more than 4,300 acres; that's the equivalent of over 3,200 football fields, including end zones. Humidity in the region is low, vegetation is dry, and winds have been blowing. Put all that together, and you have the ingredients for fires to get out of control. South Carolina's Governor has declared a state of emergency and banned outdoor burning. But his wasn't the only state affected. Georgia's forestry commission had recorded 137 wildfires that had burned almost 2,400 acres, and North Carolina's Forest Service said it had 200 fires spread over 2,100 acres. This is in a state where people are still recovering from Hurricane Helen, which flooded Western North Carolina last September.
This is what Nikki Warren and her brother Walter Harold's commercial kitchen looked like before Hurricane Helen hit North Carolina; this was afterwards. The space where they produced their blueberry jam was destroyed. We ended up with about 4 1/2 feet of mud in the kitchen. Somewhere around $70,000 worth of fruit was lost. Helen's wrath extended to homes, buildings, and roads in the Tar Heel State alone. Officials estimate nearly $60 billion in damages. 106 people died, including some of Nikki's neighbors. What we lost, what we went through, is nothing compared to our neighbors. We're through the crisis now; we're in the long term. Okay, how do we how do we get things right now? A major step towards that long-term recovery: NCDOT was prepared for a darn good storm, but nobody was prepared for something that hasn't happened in a thousand years. A stretch of Interstate 40, one of the state's vital highways connecting North Carolina and Tennessee, reopened after it collapsed in storm-related flooding. We've been closed for months now, so opening it up will will provide us a way to transport those goods in and out of of North Carolina and allow us to bring some form of tourism back to North Carolina, which will also help local economies. The rebuilding—a sigh of relief for many like Nikki and Walter. Their business is now also back up and running, just trying to get us back on some new normalcy.
I'm Mary Bell Gonzalez reporting. Across the Pacific, Japan has been battling a disaster of its own. The nation's largest forest fire in more than 30 years has burned around 5,200 acres in the northeastern part of the Japanese mainland. The country's fire and disaster management agency says it started last Wednesday. Since then, dozens of homes have been damaged, thousands of people have been evacuated, schools and train stations are closed as firefighters and members of the military take on the blaze. No word yet on what started it, but the Associated Press and other media report that parts of Northeastern Japan have seen their driest winter in [Music] decades.
On this date in world history: Happy birthday to the US Constitution! On March 4th, 1789, the US Congress met for the very first time, putting the Constitution into effect. While it's been amended 27 times, its original words remain the basis for how the government operates, and it's either the world's oldest or second oldest constitution, depending on how you see that of San Marino. The US Constitution used to list March 4th as when presidents were inaugurated, unless it fell on a Sunday. That began with the second inauguration of George Washington in 1793 and ended with Franklin D. Roosevelt's first term in 1933. But the 20th Amendment changed the inauguration date to January 20th and sped up presidential transitions. March 4th was when one of baseball's biggest stars got a really big payday—well, at least he thought so. In 1927, Babe Ruth signed a three-year contract with the New York Yankees for $70,000 a year, making the slugger the highest-paid player to that point. Today's highest-paid player, Shohei Ohtani, makes an average of $70 million per year.
Up, world! Alex, what was the name of the first video game console? Magnavox Odyssey. The first at-home console was released in 1972 and called the Magnavox Odyssey. On average, gamers ages 18 to 35 spend about 17 hours every week playing video games in the US, according to a 2024 video gamer safety listening poll. Over half of them are playing at levels that are too loud. Our hearing is something that we take for granted until we lose it. Audiologist Lindsay Creed says gamers now often use earbuds, headphones, or headsets, which can put loud noises close to the ear, and over time that can cause significant damage. There's often not much we can do to get it back at that point, but Creed says noise-induced hearing loss is preventable. First, turn down the volume, keeping it to about 50% or less, can reduce the risk of damage. Next, take listening breaks every hour; even a few minutes can help your ears recover. Finally, use headphones that offer protection, like ones that are noise-canceling. This will help reduce the uh noise in the user's environment, and really they allow them to resist the urge to crank up the volume of the game to compensate for what's going on around them. Creed says children and young adults are most vulnerable to this type of hearing loss, so she says it's important that parents stay aware and promote hearing care.
I'm Andy Gaither. Fun fact: Massachusetts has been called the Codfish State after its state fish, the codfish. Well, it's also known as the Bay State, and that's where Mr. Daniel's class is watching from, Stoneham Central Middle School. Hello to everyone in Stoneham! Next to the Old Dominion, from North Chesterfield, Virginia, we welcome Mrs. Boran's or Borin's class at Monin High School. Let's go Chiefs! And the Phoenix are rising in Fort Collins, that's in the Centennial State of Colorado, where Miss Miller's students are with us from Boltz Middle School.
A tense and terrifying display left New Yorkers stunned as high winds twisted a skyscraper scaffolding out of control hundreds of feet in the air. Don't you think you're ever a bad thing? Check that out! Two window washers were trapped on the swaying platform as strong winds twisted and slammed it against the building's exterior, sending shards of glass raining down on the streets below. Firefighters reached the 78th floor to find windows bashed in, and perhaps even more shocking, that neither trapped worker was secured to the scaffolding with safety lines. I couldn't believe what I was seeing; the fact they weren't they weren't tied off. The crew managed to secure the swinging scaffolding using ropes and rescued the window washers, who amazingly suffered only minor injuries from their wind-whipped wild ride in the Manhattan [Music] sky. Yeah, that's going to require some explanation.
Dunkirk is a port city on the far northern coast of France, that makes it a prime location for seagulls. And one of the community's Carnival traditions involves imitating them in both style and in shriek. So what does it take to win the world's seagull scream championship? As this year's winner put it, "It's all about teamwork." He said there were 20 people all working behind the scenes for him to perfect his bird call. It also helps to win the crowd, though they're pretty gull critics. Might say it's for the birds, and it certainly has its own pecking order from the winner on down to those whose calls failed to fly. But it's fans of a different feather that flocked together to gull for the gull of most believable gull screams in the Gulf Stream, and that's something truly incredible. I'm Carl Azuz for the World from A to Z, and we hope you'll fly with us again tomorrow. [Music]