While You Were Sleeping: 5 stories you might have missed, June 14

Top advisers to then-President Donald Trump told him that his claims of widespread election fraud were unfounded and would not reverse his 2020 election loss, but he refused to listen, according to testimony on Monday at a hearing of the committee investigating the Jan 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol.

Close aides and family members said they told Trump that they found no merit in a wide range of often outlandish allegations that surfaced after his election defeat, including reports of a "suspicious suitcase" containing fake ballots, a truck transporting ballots to Pennsylvania and computer chips swapped into voting machines.

"I thought, boy, if he really believes this stuff he has lost contact with, he's become detached from reality," said William Barr, who served as Trump's attorney general and was long known as loyal to the Republican president.

In video testimony, Barr bluntly dismissed claims of fraud as "bullshit" and "crazy stuff." "There was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were," he said.

US national security adviser Jake Sullivan met with China's top diplomat Yang Jiechi in Luxembourg on Monday, with Sullivan urging that Washington and Beijing keep lines of communication open to manage competition, the White House said.

The meeting came as relations between China and the United States have been tense in recent months, with the world's two largest economies clashing over everything from Taiwan and China's human rights record to its military activity in the South China Sea.

"This meeting, which followed their May 18 phone call, included candid, substantive, and productive discussion of a number of regional and global security issues, as well as key issues in US-China relations," the White House said in a statement.

Britain published plans on Monday to override some of the post-Brexit trade rules for Northern Ireland by scrapping checks and challenging the role played by the European Union's court in a new clash with Brussels.

Despite Ireland describing the move as a "new low" and Brussels talking of damaged trust, Britain pressed ahead with what Prime Minister Boris Johnson suggested were "relatively trivial" steps to improve trade and reduce bureaucracy.

European Commission Vice President Maros Sefcovic said that Brussels' reaction would be proportionate, but ruled out renegotiating the trade protocol.

Fans, air conditioning, swimming pools, cold drinks or ice-cream - all remedies were welcomed on Monday in Spain as Spaniards weathered the earliest heatwave in over 40 years.

A cloud of hot air from North Africa has sent temperatures soaring, AEMET forecasters said, and the suffocating heatwave could last in most of Spain until June 16 or 17, a few days before summer officially starts on June 21.

With temperatures surpassing 40 degrees Celsius in parts of central and southern Spain, the current heat wave is the earliest one registered since 1981, according to state meteorological agency AEMET.

Researchers said on Monday they had mapped the network in the brain linked to addiction by studying long-time smokers who abruptly quit after suffering brain lesions.

They hope the research will give future treatments a target to aim for in the fight against addiction to a range of substances.

To find out where addiction resides in the brain, the researchers studied 129 patients who were daily smokers when they had a brain lesion.