British lawmakers voted against launching a national inquiry into the U.K. grooming gang scandal on Wednesday, after objections to the way the vote was being put forward – and amid international scrutiny of the crisis spearheaded by Elon Musk.

The House of Commons voted on an amendment to hold a statutory inquiry into the scandal – where it was revealed that men of predominantly Pakistani heritage had sexually abused girls for years in towns in northern England.

The measure was an amendment to a children’s well-being and schools bill backed by the Labour government. U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer warned that a vote in favor of the amendment would kill the overall bill to which it was attached. The amendment was voted down by 364 votes to 111 in the Labour-controlled chamber, Sky News reported.

UK PM STARMER HITS BACK AGAINST MUSK ATTACKS ON CHILD GROOMING GANGS

“What we need now is action. What can’t be tolerated is the idea that this afternoon members opposite will vote down a bill which protects children,” Starmer said ahead of the vote, calling it a “wrecking amendment.”

Conservative Party Leader Kemi Badenoch pushed back.

“Be a leader, not a lawyer,” she told him, as she said that a new inquiry should investigate the connected issues between the towns. 

“The reason why a national inquiry is important is because this issue is systemic,” she said, involving “local and national officials, the police, prosecutors and politicians.”

“These interlinked issues cannot be covered by local inquiries alone,” she said.

Previous reports had found evidence of “appalling” abuse, with more than 1,400 girls abused between 1997 and 2013 in Rotherham alone. Reports also found that authorities had been scared of fueling racism in their handling of the crimes given the ethnic makeup of the perpetrators. The scandal tapped into brewing concerns about multiculturalism and mass immigration.

The issue came back to the spotlight recently after local officials in Oldham called on the government to launch a national inquiry into the town’s handling of the crisis. A 2022 report had found that children had been failed by officials, but had found no cover-up despite concerns that it would be capitalized on by right-wing activists.

ELON MUSK DEMANDS UK ACT ON GROOMING GANG SCANDAL AMID GROWING CALLS FOR PROBE

The U.K. government rejected the request, saying that any inquiry should be organized locally. That, in turn, drew calls from Badenoch and Elon Musk for a national inquiry.

The Palace of Westminster, the Houses of Parliament, in the heart of London.

“Across the country, thousands of girls were tortured and sexually abused at the hands of men who treated them as things to be used and disposed of, destroying many lives forever. The prime minister has mentioned previous inquiries. He is right, there has been an inquiry into child sexual abuse. But it wasn’t about the rape gang scandal,” Badenoch said.

Musk, who has been hammering away at the issue on X – even calling for the prosecution of top U.K. government officials, including Starmer – appealed again to the British public before the vote.

President-elect Trump and Elon Musk attend a SpaceX Starship launch on Nov. 19, 2024, in Brownsville, Texas. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

“Please call your member of parliament and tell them that the hundreds of thousands of little girls in Britain who were, and are still are, being systematically, horrifically gang-raped deserve some justice in this world,” Musk said on X on Wednesday.

“This is vitally important, or it will just keep happening,” he said.

BRITAIN HIT BY ANOTHER ASIAN GROOMING GANG SCANDAL AS REPORT EXPOSES CHILD SEX ABUSE IN MANCHESTER

Starmer had previously slammed “lies and misinformation” without naming Musk directly, and had accused U.K. politicians of jumping on a “bandwagon of the far-right.”

On Wednesday, he again accused Badenoch of jumping on a bandwagon and urged lawmakers to make sure the broader bill passed.

“One of the provisions in the bill is to protect children vulnerable today who are out of school to prevent abuses ever taking those children out of school. I implore members opposite to defy the misleading leadership of the Leader of the Opposition and vote for a really important bill.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

A Russian guided bomb attack on the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia has killed at least 13 civilians and injured about 30 others, officials said.

Graphic footage posted on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Telegram page on Wednesday showed bloodied civilians lying in a city street being treated by emergency services.

“There is nothing more brutal than aerial bombing of a city, knowing that ordinary civilians will suffer,” Zelenskyy wrote on X.

High-rise residential blocks, an industrial facility and other infrastructure were damaged in the attack, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office said on Telegram on Wednesday. The debris hit a tram and a bus with passengers inside, it added.

Regional Governor Ivan Fedorov said Russian forces launched guided bombs at a residential area in the city in the middle of the afternoon, and at least two residential buildings were struck in the attack.

Moscow has frequently launched aerial attacks on civilian infrastructure during its almost three-year war on Ukraine. It has consistently denied targeting civilians.

Al Jazeera’s Jonah Hull, reporting from Kharkiv in Ukraine, said that “strikes were aimed at what has been described as an ‘industrial site’.”

Hull described “scenes of devastation outside a factory, in a multi-storey apartment building opposite … in addition to a passing tram and minibus, which would have been carrying passengers.”

Marina Miron, a military analyst at King’s College London, told Al Jazeera that “the plant had already been targeted in November, as the Russians say Ukrainians were using it to assemble drones”.

“Owing to the deaths of civilians, however, there is a possibility that Russian navigation systems were jammed,” said Miron.

The attack comes as both Russia and Ukraine seek to project strength before US President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20.

Earlier in the day, the Ukrainian military said it had struck a fuel storage depot inside Russia, causing a huge blaze at a facility that supplies missiles to a Russian air base.

Ukraine’s General Staff said that the assault hit the storage facility near Engels, in Russia’s Saratov region, about 600km (373 miles) east of the Ukrainian border.

As Ukraine faces certain restrictions in using Western-supplied missiles, Kyiv has been developing its own long-range arsenal capable of reaching targets behind its front line.

The attacks have disrupted Russian logistics in the war, which began on February 24, 2022.

‘Serious security guarantees’

Earlier on Wednesday, Zelenskyy said that countries wanting to end the war should offer Ukraine assurances about its future defence.

“To be honest, I believe that we have a right to demand serious security guarantees from countries that aim for the peace in the world,” Zelenskyy said.

Ukraine’s leader was speaking at a news conference in Kyiv, responding to comments from US President-elect Donald Trump that he understood Russia’s opposition to neighbouring Ukraine joining NATO.

Speaking to reporters from his Mar-a-Lago estate in a wide-ranging media conference late on Tuesday, Trump said “Russia has somebody right on their doorstep, and I could understand their feelings about that.”

The United States, Germany, Hungary and Slovakia have stood in the way of Ukraine immediately joining the 32-nation NATO alliance, Zelenskyy noted.

BOSTON (AP) — The cost of college keeps spiraling ever higher, right?

Not necessarily. New research indicates students are paying significantly less to attend public universities than they were a decade ago. And tuition increases at private colleges have finally slowed after years of hefty rises.

Figures compiled by the nonprofit College Board indicate the average student attending an in-state public university this year faces a tuition bill of $11,610, which is down 4% from a decade earlier when taking inflation into account. But the real savings come in what the average student actually pays after getting grants and financial aid. That’s down 40% over the decade, from $4,140 to $2,480 annually, according to the data.

That reduced cost means less borrowing. Just under half of students attending in-state public universities are graduating with some debt, down from 59% a decade earlier, according to the College Board figures. And among those who do borrow, the average loan balance has fallen by 17%, to $27,100.

Meanwhile, at private colleges, tuition continues to rise, but at a much slower rate. It has increased 4% over the past decade, when taking inflation into account, to an average $43,350, according to the College Board. That’s a big change from the two decades prior, when tuition increased 68%.

Costs are coming down as Americans question whether college is worth the price. Surveys find that Americans are increasingly skeptical about the value of a degree, and the percentage of high school graduates heading to college has fallen to levels not seen in decades, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Yet research still finds that, over time, a degree pays off. Americans with a bachelor’s degree earn a median of $2.8 million during their careers, 75% more than if they had only a high school diploma, according to research from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a big factor in the cost reductions, said Jennifer Ma, an executive research scientist at the College Board and lead author of the study.

“We know that during COVID, a lot of institutions — public and private — froze tuition,” Ma said.

As states and the federal government responded to the pandemic, Ma said, they increased higher education funding, allowing colleges to reduce the cost of attendance. Some of that money has since expired, however, including an infusion of federal pandemic aid that was mostly used up by the end of 2022.

Cost was a major consideration in Kai Mattinson’s decision to attend Northern Arizona University. It would have cost her about $39,000 annually to attend the public university but discounts and scholarships bring that down to between $15,000 and $20,000 for the 22-year-old senior from Nevada.

“I originally wanted to go to the University of Arizona, but when it came down to tuition and other cost, Northern Arizona University was the best option,” said Mattinson, a physical education major who also works as a long-term substitute at a local elementary school.

Many institutions have tried to limit cost increases. Purdue University in Indiana, for example, has frozen its annual in-state tuition at $9,992 for the past 13 years.

Mark Becker, the president of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, said he was pleased to see the new data.

“Institutional efforts to control costs, combined with many states’ efforts to increase investments in public universities and federal investment in the Pell Grant, have increased college affordability and enabled significant progress on tackling student debt,” Becker said in a statement.

Costs for those attending public two-year community colleges have fallen even more, by 9% over the past decade, according to the College Board data, which is broadly in line with federal figures collected by the National Center for Education Statistics.

Still, for parents paying for their children to attend out-of-state public universities or private colleges, the costs remain daunting — as much as $95,000 annually, in some cases. However, many institutions offer significant discounts to the sticker price for middle- and lower-income students.

Some private colleges have been expanding their financial aid, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which in November announced undergraduates with a family income below $200,000 would no longer need to pay any tuition at all starting in the fall.

Other private colleges are discounting tuition as a marketing move in an increasingly difficult environment. They face a dwindling pool of young adults, and students who are more wary of signing up for giant loans. Recruiting students is crucial for staying afloat as operational costs rise. After temporary relief thanks to federal money during the pandemic, many colleges have cut programs to try to keep costs under control.

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Associated Press writer Collin Binkley contributed to this report from Washington, D.C. Mumphrey reported from Phoenix.