While You Were Sleeping: 5 stories you might have missed, July 13

Sri Lanka's embattled President Gotabaya Rajapaksa flew out of the country early Wednesday in a military plane heading to the neighbouring Maldives, local officials said, following widespread protests against him.

The 73-year-old leader, his wife and a bodyguard were among four passengers on board an Antonov-32 aircraft which took off from the main international airport, immigration officials told AFP.

“Their passports were stamped and they boarded the special air force flight,” an immigration official involved in the process said.

There was no immediate confirmation Rajapaksa had reached the Maldives.

US lawmakers on Tuesday accused Donald Trump of inciting a mob of followers to attack the US Capitol on Jan 6, 2021, in a last-ditch bid to remain in power as Congress was formally certifying the then-president’s election loss.

In video testimony shown by the House of Representatives committee investigating the riot, witnesses described a loud late-night six-hour meeting on Dec 18, 2020, where Trump disregarded White House staffers who urged him to concede the November 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden.

Instead, Trump sided with outside advisers who urged him to keep pressing his baseless claims of election fraud. Committee members said Trump ultimately was responsible for the chaos that followed.

Nasa on Tuesday drew back the curtain on billions of years of cosmic evolution with the inaugural batch of photos from the largest, most powerful observatory ever launched to space, saying the luminous imagery showed the telescope exceeds expectations.  

The first full-colour, high-resolution pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope, designed to peer farther than before with greater clarity to the dawn of the universe, were hailed by Nasa as milestone marking a new era of astronomical exploration.  

Nearly two decades in the making and built under contract for Nasa by aerospace giant Northrop Grumman Corp, the US$9 billion infrared telescope was launched on Dec 25, 2021.

Surgeons at New York University have successfully transplanted genetically-engineered pig hearts into two brain-dead people, researchers said on Tuesday, moving a step closer to a long-term goal of using pig parts to address the shortage of human organs for transplant.

The hearts functioned normally, with no signs of rejection during the three-day experiments in June and July, they said at a news conference.

The experiments followed the death in March of a 57-year-old man with terminal heart disease who made history two months earlier at the University of Maryland as the first person to receive a genetically modified pig heart.

About 20 million Americans quit their jobs in the first five months of this year, in what's come to be known as the Great Resignation.

Many now regret the decision, according to a new survey.

More than one-quarter of those who left work are reconsidering whether they made the right move, according to a study of more than 15,000 job seekers conducted over the past three months by Joblist, an artificial intelligence job-search platform.