We live in strange times, said Holly Hudson on The Daily Beast. Who’d have thought, for instance, that the day would come when Marjorie Taylor Greene began “sounding… kind of reasonable”? The Georgia congresswoman has until now been best known as a conservative firebrand and conspiracy loon. She famously suggested that wildfires might have been started by “Jewish space lasers”, and railed against the “Gazpacho police” (she meant “Gestapo”). Over recent weeks, however, this once-staunch Trump loyalist has started taking the administration to task. She has blamed Republican leaders for the government shutdown; sided with Democrats in calling for an extension of tax credits for health insurance; railed against high inflation; and stated that her party has “no plan”. Greene’s independent streak has not gone unnoticed by Trump, who has apparently been calling around and asking: “What’s been going on with Marjorie?”

Trump is right to ask, said Melanie Zanona on NBC News, as Greene is “arguably more in tune with the Maga base than any other member of Congress”. Her attacks may, in fact, be partly motivated by pique: sources say she’s cross that the White House talked her out of running for the Senate, and is disappointed not to have been given a cabinet role. But there’s also political calculation at work, said Rex Huppke in USA Today. Greene is positioning herself for the post-Trump era. She can see that the president’s popularity is sliding and that the economy is not working well for most Americans. She’s a “gifted grifter dipping a toe in the pool of Trump defiance to see if it makes waves she can ride”.

Greene’s rebellion is a warning to the Republicans, said Matt Wylie in The State. “She’s not going rogue; she’s echoing the frustrations she’s hearing from her own base.” Trump keeps insisting that prices are falling, yet it’s clear his trade tariffs are hitting people in the pocket. Grocery bills are rising; pay cheques are shrinking. Some voters, meanwhile, are unhappy about Trump launching legal assaults on his political enemies and deploying troops in cities. “Economic pain, institutional mistrust and political exhaustion are converging into something volatile – a storm of disillusionment that no amount of populist rhetoric can overcome.” The GOP needs to start governing more effectively, or “the cracks in the Maga movement will only widen”.

It came years too late, but last week, Prince Andrew finally accepted that his “rancid” reputation had become a threat to the monarchy, said the Daily Mail. Having stepped away from royal duties in 2019, he released a statement confirming he was now “voluntarily” relinquishing all the titles conferred on him, including his dukedom and his status as a Knight of the Garter. The Palace – reeling from fresh revelations about the prince’s involvement with the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and further reports of Andrew’s ties to suspected Chinese spies – let it be known that he would no longer be attending family Christmases at Sandringham.

In his somewhat “bullish” statement, Andrew tried to frame the loss of his titles as his own decision, said Hannah Furness in The Telegraph; but of course, it wasn’t. He was forced into it by a King whose patience had snapped, in the wake of a slew of toxic headlines that had threatened to overshadow his historic visit to the Vatican this week. The reports that Andrew had met, at least three times, the Beijing official at the heart of the Westminster spy case were bad enough, said The Times. Even worse was evidence that Andrew had lied about his contacts with Epstein. In his disastrous Newsnight interview in 2019, he insisted that he had cut Epstein off in December 2010 (when they were photographed together in Central Park). Yet it emerged last weekend that 12 weeks later, he’d sent the convicted paedophile an email, saying they were “in this together”, and would “play some more soon!!!!”.

A day before Andrew sent that email, said The Mail on Sunday, the press had published the now-notorious photograph of him with Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre, then 17. Andrew says he does not recall ever meeting her, and that the photo is fake. Yet we know now what he said to Epstein in response to the surfacing of that photo, said Jan Moir in the Daily Mail; and it doesn’t boost his case. Nor does the content of Giuffre’s memoir “Nobody’s Girl”, published posthumously this week. It paints a distressing portrait of a vulnerable girl, repeatedly raped as a child, then manipulated, abused and exploited by Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell – who were not so much partners, Giuffre says, but “two halves of a wicked whole”. When they allegedly served her up to Andrew, in 2001, he was asked to guess her age. She says that he correctly surmised that she was 17, then told her that his daughters were only a bit younger than her. That didn’t stop him having sex with her, the book says (the Prince denies it): he viewed it as “his birthright”. Allegedly they had sex on two more occasions, once with multiple girls. How can he live with himself? The least Andrew could do now, said Libby Purves in The Times, would be to reveal what he knows about Epstein’s sordid world. That way, he might just win back a shred of public respect. Instead, he carries on dismissing Giuffre as a liar.

Andrew has brought shame on his family for so long, it is hard to remember that he was once the “golden boy”, said Kate Mansey in The Times – the dashing naval helicopter pilot who served in the Falklands War. But that reputation did not last. An early official visit to the US turned into a PR disaster when he grabbed a paint sprayer and turned it on the press pack. He thought it was funny. The tabloids dubbed him Randy Andy, for his many girlfriends; later, his fondness for going on lavish, publicly funded foreign trips as a UK trade ambassador earned him the nickname Air Miles Andy. In 2011, he was forced to step down from that role, owing to concern about the many gifts he had received and the dubious contacts he had made. They included Epstein, but also the likes of Saif Gaddafi, the son of the Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi.

The royal family is culpable, said Kevin Maguire in the Daily Mirror. If they were really horrified by the charges against Andrew, they’d have cut him off years ago. Instead, the late Queen reportedly helped him pay £12 million to keep Giuffre’s story out of court. They hoped that getting him to relinquish his titles would finally draw a line under the matter – but it’s not going away. Police are looking into reports that Andrew had Giuffre’s social security number, and asked his protection officer to dig for dirt on her; more damaging emails may yet emerge from the Epstein files in the US. Moreover, to an angry public, Andrew doesn’t look disgraced. He is still living in his 30-room mansion in Windsor, with its 98 acres of private grounds. Having spent around £8 million on repairs when he moved in, he pays no rent and his lease lasts until 2078. And he is still a prince, for goodness sake. He could, in theory, be stripped of that title, said Anne McElvoy in The i Paper. Prince William – who has hinted that he’ll have a very different, modernised monarchy – is said to have argued for his uncle to be treated more brutally. But the King, who is in fragile health, will have perceived that there is a danger in pushing Andrew too far. If the Prince feels he has nothing left to lose, who knows what he might do or say.

After Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head by the Taliban in 2012, she made a remarkable recovery, resettling in Birmingham with her family and eventually winning a place at Oxford, said Sirin Kale in The Guardian. But her time at the university was far from straightforward.

As the breadwinner not only for her parents and two brothers, but also for her extended family back in Pakistan – at one point she was even paying for two family friends to attend college in the US and Canada – she had to balance her studies with taking on paid speaking events, to keep everyone dependent on her afloat. In her first-year exams, she got a 2:2 and had to seek additional help from tutors; when she was home, she says, her father would treat their house like “an art museum”, wheeling her out to admiring visitors “like the signature piece in the collection”.

Her mental health then took a dive when, one night in Oxford, she took some puffs of cannabis from a bong. Suddenly, memories of the Taliban attack – which she had long repressed – started replaying in her mind on a loop: the gunshot, the blood spray, the crowds. “I thought nothing could scare me, nothing,” she says. “And then I was scared of small things, and that just broke me. But, you know, in this journey I realised what it means to be actually brave. When you can not only fight the real threats out there, but fight within.”