When the US agreed to normalise relations with the oil-rich yet desperately poor South American nation of Venezuela, it was with the proviso that Nicolás Maduro would hold "free and fair elections".

Most of the world does not recognise the legitimacy of the presidency of Maduro, who inherited power from the late revolutionary Hugo Chávez in 2013 and whose re-election in 2018 was widely condemned as fraudulent. But an agreement reached last October may give Venezuelans the chance to vote the unpopular incumbent out of the Miraflores Palace on 28 July.

How is the election campaign going?
The authorities disqualified hugely popular opposition leader María Corina Machado, who had won more than 90% of the vote in the primaries, on "trumped-up grounds", said The Economist. Machado has since "ceded all her political capital" to proxy Edmundo González Urrutia, a 74-year-old diplomat who "until now had moved behind the scenes of power", said El País, and who leads in the polls by 20% to 30%.

For the first time since 2013, the Maduro government "looks scared", said Foreign Policy. "It fears democracy," wrote Christopher Sabatini, senior research fellow for Latin America at Chatham House. About two-thirds of Venezuelans say they would support any opposition candidate against Maduro. "Stealing this contest won't be as easy as it was for Maduro in 2017, 2018 or 2020."

Will the vote be 'free and fair'?
The regime's internal polling shows that in a fair vote, Maduro would be "totally doomed", a source told The Economist. But he "appears determined to cling to power – through intimidation".

Maduro controls most state institutions, including the courts, electoral authorities, army and much of the media – "not to mention violent paramilitary gangs", said The New York Times (NYT). And there is "widespread doubt" that he would accept an opposition victory.

What are the stakes?
If Maduro claims victory, Venezuela will "remain paralysed", said El País. A second presidency for a hostile Donald Trump would "complicate things even further". Also at stake is the future of Venezuela's oil reserves – the largest in the world – and the strength of its alliances with China, Russia and Iran.

Racing towards a potentially deadly storm may sound like an absurd thing to do – but for some scientific researchers, chasing extreme weather can be enlightening as well as exhilarating. 

Storm chasers and their pursuit of tornadoes caught the public's imagination in 1996, with the release of Hollywood blockbuster "Twister". The sequel, "Twisters", is out this week, and its creators are hoping to enthral a new generation of extreme-weather watchers. 

Unravelling a meteorological mystery
Scientists now know far more about tornadoes than they did for much of the 20th century, said BBC Earth. But why some thunderstorms create "violent" twisters and others don't "largely remains a meteorological mystery". Researchers who chase down storms do so in an effort to make sense of "tornadogenesis", the process through which tornadoes form.

Chasers face multiple challenges, including having a "very narrow window to gather their data". They often have only 15 minutes to get into position and get their radars and monitoring equipment set up, and "the actual formation of a tornado often happens on a time scale of just a few seconds", researcher Robin Tanamachi told the news site.

Chasers also risk losing their orientation in the storm, when driving is treacherous, with visibility sometimes "near zero", Dave Call, professor in geography at Ball State University, told Vox. So they must be sure to "always have at least one escape route".

Following a storm, any "eureka moments" take time, said Penn State meteorology professors Yvette Richardson and Paul Markowski on The Conversation. It can take "years" to analyse the information captured.

A cinematic twist   
Lee Isaac Chung's new film about tornadoes takes "some dramatic licence", said science journalist Alexandra Witze at Nature. But the new release is "much more accurate" than its predecessor. 

US National Severe Storms Laboratory meteorologist Sean Waugh, who worked as a consultant on the movie, even "hand-picked data from famous real-life tornadoes to illustrate similar twisters on the big screen". The film, he said, has provided "an incredible opportunity to inspire the next generation of scientists". 

BBC One's latest crime thriller doesn't get off to the best start. At first, "The Jetty" feels as if the show's creator and writer, Cat Jones, has "thrown a load of clichés at a wall in the hope that one will reel us in", said Emily Baker on the i news site. But once it gets going, the "twists and shocks come at a rapid pace".

Detective Ember Manning (Jenna Coleman) is assigned to look into an arson attack on a boathouse in her sleepy Lancashire town. But after delving into the cold case of a local teenage girl, Amy, who vanished decades earlier, Manning is forced to confront her own past, re-evaluating her relationship with her late husband.

After a shaky start, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian, the show develops into an "unexpectedly attentive meditation on what it means to move as a woman through a world that is suffused with male violence in all its myriad forms". 

Coleman is "never less than magnetic" as the sardonic Manning, said Vicky Jessop in the London Evening Standard. The "wonderfully claustrophobic" series keeps viewers "hooked" as she digs deeper into the case, and a sense of "unease grows and grips ever tighter". 

It can be a bit "heavy-handed" at times, said Baker on the i news site, and the show's exploration of misogyny and violence against women sometimes feels more "frying pan to the head" instead of "creeping realisation". Still, TV has been "crying out" for a series like this: "I can't remember the last time a BBC crime series gripped me this much."

I call on Keir Starmer to suspend arms sales to Israel and end Britain's complicity in the killing
Zarah Sultana for The Guardian
"Whenever I see the heart-wrenching aftermath of an Israeli airstrike in Gaza," writes Labour MP Zarah Sultana, "I ask myself the same question: were British-made weapons used to inflict this horror?" Our new government "must do the right thing" and "stop enabling Israeli war crimes". An arms ban is "backed by 56% of the public", and "I urge colleagues: uphold international law, suspend arms sales to Israel, and back my amendment".

What do we gain from going back to the Moon?
Clive Cookson and Peggy Hollinger in the FT
For all the investment in the race to the Moon, there is "no guarantee" that the new space race will have a "lasting impact", write Clive Cookson and Peggy Hollinger. Space industry experts acknowledge that it could result in "little more than sporadic scientific missions". Opinions differ on "when or even whether" lunar tourism will "take off on a significant scale", and there is doubt over whether the Moon holds resources "valuable enough to extract and bring back to Earth".

To make gains, Reform must move to the left
Daniel Finkelstein in The Times
In the aftermath of the election, there has been "vigorous debate" about "uniting the right", says Daniel Finkelstein. But is this "in the interests of Reform"? A national populist party is "not really a party of the right", so "the obvious play" for Reform is not "to unite the right" but to "tack to the left". Nigel Farage "might have to invest in something where he pays the costs and the benefits go to other people". But does this strike you as "very like him"?