Elon Musk has reignited the row over grooming gangs, accusing Keir Starmer of being "deeply complicit in the mass rapes, in exchange for votes". In a series of posts on X, the billionaire said Starmer had failed to deal with the scandal while head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) between 2008 and 2013. In response, the prime minister has accused critics – without mentioning Musk – of "spreading lies and misinformation".

What is the grooming gangs scandal?
In a series of high-profile cases of sexual abuse, groups of men, primarily of Pakistani descent, were convicted of exploiting and raping girls as young as 13 in various towns in the UK. A 2012 newspaper investigation led to a major inquiry in Rotherham. The subsequent report by Professor Alexis Jay found that at least 1,400 children were abused in the town between 1997 and 2013 – a figure the Financial Times said was "conservatively estimated".

Similar crimes were uncovered in Oldham, Oxford, Rochdale and Telford, raising serious concerns over systemic failures to protect victims and prosecute offenders. This spurred a national inquiry into child sexual abuse, again chaired by Jay, which published its final report in October 2022. Contrary to some internet claims, "there is no evidence of any organised cover-up", said The Guardian.

What did Starmer do as DPP?
As director of public prosecutions (DPP) between 2008 and 2013, Starmer oversaw the CPS during the scandal's early days. Criticism that he bears responsibility for failings in bringing grooming gangs to justice largely stems from a 2009 decision by the CPS not to prosecute suspects in a single Rochdale case, citing concerns about the victim's credibility.

There is no evidence to suggest Starmer was "aware of the details of the case at the time", said the FT. Nazir Afzal, then chief prosecutor for northwest England, reversed the decision in 2011, leading to the conviction of nine men. He said that Starmer was "100 per cent behind the decision to publicly admit that we had got it wrong in the past".

What has Starmer said?
The PM has "robustly" defended his record, said the BBC. He said he changed prosecution guidance on child sexual exploitation in 2013 to "challenge myths and stereotypes" that had stopped victims from being heard, and pointed out that, when he left office, the CPS had the highest number of child sex-abuse prosecutions on record.

Caravan owners from across the UK are launching a mass legal action against holiday parks for allegedly misleading them when they were buying their mobile homes.

The widespread mis-selling is a "national scandal", said Carole Keeble, founder of the Holiday Park Action Group, which brought the lawsuit. People have been "losing their pensions, inheritance or having to sell their own homes to cover the losses they are incurring", she told the BBC.

A pitched battle
Around 1,200 members of the Holiday Park Action Group are seeking compensation for what they say are undeclared increases in annual pitch fees and misleading claims about the value of static caravans at the time of purchase.

Other "hidden costs" include owners having to keep their caravans fully insured, "which can cost thousands", said the Daily Mail. Sites sometimes insist utilities and cleaning services are organised through them, too, which can cost above the market rate. BBC One's "Panorama" also revealed how people had been tricked into buying homes in holiday parks without residential licences in the false belief that they could live there all year round.

New protections
Caravan owners are protected by consumer rights laws, enforced by the Competition and Markets Authority. But Hugh Preston KC, who is representing the Holiday Park Action Group claimants, described the mobile homes sector as "essentially unregulated", with "no statutory regulations that tell parks what to do or how to behave".

He will ask the High Court to declare whether annual pitch fee increases written into the contract are "fair and enforceable" and if not, whether buyers are entitled to a refund. A second claim will ask whether holiday parks should be expected to explain to buyers that caravans decrease in value substantially if resold after only a few years – and if they can be compensated for lost value.

The last Conservative government rejected calls for protections to be strengthened. But a spokesperson for the Department for Business and Trade said the current government plans to introduce tough financial penalties for breaches of consumer law, and was committed to protecting consumers from "rogue practices".

Nestled at the foot of the Julian Alps, Gorizia is one of those "rare hidden gems that is simply not on the radar of most tourists, or even most Italians", said John Brunton in The Guardian. At the end of the Second World War, the town was "unceremoniously split" between post-Mussolini Italy and communist Yugoslavia, with a "brutal metal barrier" separating the two halves.

Now, those two halves, Gorizia (pictured above) in Italy and Nova Gorica – the "idealistic" new town established on the other side of the border in 1947, in what is now Slovenia – are set to become the "first-ever single European capital of culture to combine cities in two countries".

While the towns have garnered "little attention" over the years, "all that is set to change". Starting in February, an "ambitious" calendar of 600 cultural events will kick off in both towns, spanning everything from art exhibits and film viewings to live shows and music performances.

While both towns are "cut from the same cloth", there's a stark contrast between them, said Noah Charney on BBC Culture. Gorizia is "old-worldly, cobblestoned and lined with lively cafes", while Nova Gorica is a Modernist town with a "relative newness" and "concrete architecture laid out in lines". It may seem "unglamorous" at first but look carefully and you'll soon discover "hidden gardens, crumbling palaces and tucked-away Social Realist frescoes".

There isn't any checkpoint or barrier between the two towns, so you won't realise when you cross between them. "It's the perfect place to see how borderlessness can function smoothly in practice", and 2025 is the ideal time to "celebrate one of the true transnational places in Europe".

Ukraine risks losing the war. A Trump-imposed bad deal would be worse
The Washington Post's editorial board
The "next few weeks" will "determine" Ukraine's fate, says The Washington Post, and "how this conflict is resolved" will undoubtedly have "ramifications far beyond Ukraine". Donald Trump, who takes office on 20 January, has "promised to end the war quickly" but has "offered no specific details of a plan". The "haste" to find a settlement "could produce a bad one" that would "reward" Vladimir Putin and "guarantee he will launch a new attack for more territory".

This is how the grooming scandal is being weaponised – and this is what Starmer must do
Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian
The victims of child grooming have become "pawns in an unedifying power struggle" on the right of British politics as "the world's richest man tests the limits of his influence over it", writes Gaby Hinsliff. But "strip away all the hysteria on X", and "the hype about whether Reform can overtake the Tories", and what remains is a job to which Keir Starmer is "well suited": the "long hard slog of rebuilding battered confidence" in the criminal-justice system.

Dungeons & Dragons shows that modish guff doesn't serve diversity and inclusion
Stephen Bush in the Financial Times
Elon Musk has "belatedly noticed" the reworking of the rules of the "Dungeons & Dragons" game "in the name of diversity and inclusion", writes Stephen Bush. The "seemingly silly row" is "a useful case study" in how organisations tackle diversity and inclusion, "both well and badly". There are "worthwhile" changes but also "a lot of modish language", and the new player handbook "cannot explain" why the changes are being made or "why they are valuable" in "plain and accessible language".