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Two persons died when a container bearing an Indian registration number plate hit a motorbike they were riding on at Ganga Chowk in Budhiganga Rural Municipality-2 of Morang district on Friday.

The container (HR 38 X 2210) hit the motorbike (Ko 30 Pa 9103) heading towards Itahari from Biratnagar at 6: 45 am today.

According to Inspector Raj Kumar Karki, Chief at the Morang Traffic Police Office, the deceased have been identified as bike rider Harka Pariyar (27) and pillion rider Bhim Bahadur Rai (21) of Kerabari Rural Municipality-7 of Morang.

Police said that they have impounded the container and arrested its driver for investigation.

Karki said that the container hit the motorbike from behind when it tried to overtake in the narrow road.

Following the incident, locals obstructed the Koshi Highway demanding stern action against the container driver.

Police said that they are looking into the case.

Police in Brazil say 18 people have been killed during a raid against a criminal gang that controls one of Rio de Janeiro's most violent favelas, BBC reported.

Four hundred heavily-armed military police were deployed to the Alemão favela in the early hours of Thursday.

Sixteen of the dead were suspected criminals, while a police officer and a bystander were the other two victims, officials said.

The operation lasted all day and left thousands trapped in their homes.

The objective of the raid was to locate and arrest criminals who were planning operations in rival slums, police said.

Some of the targets were wearing uniforms similar to military police, which made them harder to spot, local media outlet O Dia reported.

The 400 officers were backed up by 10 bullet-proof vehicles and four helicopters.

Locals were seen carrying injured people into vehicles as police watched, according to BBC.

Gilberto Santiago Lopes, from the Anacrim Human Rights Commission, said police refused to help.

The police "don't aim to arrest them, they aim to kill them, so if they're injured, they think they don't deserve help", he told Reuters.

Deadly raids are not uncommon in Rio de Janeiro's favelas, as police seek to hunt down drug trafficking gangs. 

But human rights groups in Brazil are highly critical of police operations in overcrowded, low-income communities, saying they put the lives of residents at risk without really curbing the power of the gangs. 

In May, 22 people were killed, also including a female bystander, in the Vila Cruzeiro favela.

Last year, at least 25 people, including a police officer, were killed in a shootout in the Jacarezinho area of the city, BBC reported.

Astronomers can for the first time detect the smashing together of dead suns know as neutron stars, thanks to a powerful new telescope, BBC reported.

Collisions of neutron stars are key to our understanding of the Universe. 

They are thought to have created heavy metals that formed stars and planets like our own billions of years ago. 

Light from the crashes is only visible for a couple of nights so the telescope must race to locate them. 

Astronomers observed one of these collisions in 2017, but largely came across it by luck.

The British built Gravitational Wave Optical Transient observer (GOTO), located above the clouds on the volcanic Spanish island of La Palma will now systematically hunt for them. 

"When a really good detection comes along, it's all hands on deck to make the most of it," Prof Danny Steeghs, of Warwick University told me on La Palma. 

"Speed is of the essence. We are looking for something very short-lived - there's not much time before they fade away". 

Neutron stars are so heavy that a small teaspoon of their material weighs four billion tonnes. 

The telescope allows astronomers to effectively crack one open to see what is inside.

So that it can get a clear view of the sky, the telescope is situated on a mountain peak, home to a dozen instruments of all shapes and sizes, each studying different phenomena, according to BBC.

When its twin domes open, they reveal two jet-black batteries of eight cylindrical telescopes bolted together - structures that look more like menacing rocket launchers. Each battery covers every patch of sky above it by rapidly rotating vertically and horizontally 

A neutron star is a dead sun that has collapsed under its immense weight, crushing the atoms that once made it shine. They have such strong gravity that they are drawn to each other. Eventually they crash together and merge. 

When that happens, they create a flash of light and a powerful shockwave ripples across the Universe. It makes everything in the Universe wobble, including, imperceptibly, the atoms inside each one of us. 

The shockwave, called a gravitational wave, distorts space. When it is detected on Earth, the new telescope scrambles into action to find the exact location of the flash.

The operators aim to locate it within hours, or even minutes of the gravitational wave detection. They take photographs of the sky and then digitally remove the stars, planets and galaxies that were there the previous night. Any speck of light that wasn't there before may be the colliding neutron stars. 

This normally takes days and weeks, but now it must be done in real time. It's a big task, done using computer software. 

"You would think that these explosions are very energetic, very luminous, it should be easy," said astrophysics professor Dr Joe Lyman. "But we are having to search through a hundred million stars for the one object that we are interested in, BBC reported.

"We have to do this very rapidly because the object will disappear within two days."

The team work with other astronomers to study the collision in greater detail. 

Once they pinpoint the collision, they turn to larger, more powerful telescopes across the world. These probe the collision in much greater detail, and at different wavelengths. 

This process is "telling us about physics at the extreme," Dr Lyman explains. 

The mountain peak brings the astronomers a little bit closer to the stars. With the telescope they have a new way to peer into the cosmos, says GOTO's instrumentation scientist, Dr Kendall Ackley, according to BBC.

Traditional astronomy was about being lucky, she says. "Now we're not hoping for new discoveries anymore. Instead, we're being told where to find them, and getting to uncover, piece-by-piece what lies out there in the Universe."

The European Central Bank (ECB) has raised interest rates for the first time in more than 11 years as it tries to control soaring eurozone inflation, BBC reported.

The ECB increased its key interest rate by 0.5 percentage points to 0.0% and plans further hikes this year.

The rate has been negative since 2014 in a bid to boost the region's economy after years of weak growth.

But consumer prices rose at a record 8.6% in the 12 months to June as food, fuel and energy costs soared.

That is well above the bank's 2% target.

Inflation is the pace at which prices are rising. For example, if a bottle of milk costs €1 and that rises by 5 cents compared with a year earlier, then milk inflation is 5%.

The Ukraine war and Covid supply chain issues have driven up everyday costs across the eurozone, putting pressure on households.

The bloc is vulnerable because it relies heavily on Russia for its oil and gas. This week it urged member states to begin rationing supplies amid fears Moscow will halt gas deliveries this year, causing further price spikes, according to BBC.

Explaining its decision to raise rates in July, ECB president Christine Lagarde said: "Economic activity [in the eurozone] is slowing. Russia's unjustified aggression towards Ukraine is an ongoing drag on growth.

"We expect inflation to remain undesirably high for some time owing to continued pressure from energy and food prices and pipeline pressures in the pricing chain," she added. 

The bank says further rate hikes "will be appropriate" and that it will take a "meeting-by-meeting" approach to raising rates.

It comes after the Bank of England and the US Federal Reserve put up their rates to try and rein in rising prices. 

The idea is that by making it more expensive to borrow, people will spend less, bringing down demand and therefore prices. 

However, there are also concerns that higher rates could push countries into recession - which is defined as two successive quarters of economic decline, BBC reported.

These fears helped push the euro to a 20-year low against the dollar in recent weeks.

The ECB began cutting interest rates after the 2008 financial crisis to stimulate growth, and took them as low as -0.5% during the pandemic.

However, earlier this year it signalled it planned to increase them again, although economists had only expected an increase of 0.25 percentage points in July, according to BBC.