Teenagers enjoying girls' night party claim notorious Apex-linked gang 'Menace to Society' gatecrashed their apartment on night 19-year-old girl was stabbed to death

A group of girls enjoying an all-night birthday party have claimed members of the Apex-linked 'Menace to Society' gang gatecrashed their party on the morning their 19-year-old friend was stabbed to death.

Police have been told by party-goers at the event that they recognised the intruders as members of the notorious gang, reports The Herald Sun.

Kenyan-born Laa Chol was killed on July 21 at 5am when a group of young African-Australians crashed the party, held in a rented apartment in Melbourne's EQ Tower.

The witnesses claim that Ms Chol was trying to get the intruders to leave when she was stabbed. Two boys have been charged over Ms Chol's death.

A  17-year-old boy was arrested on Monday and charged with her murder. He is being held in custody while police prepare evidence including CCTV footage and witness accounts.

A 16-year-old was arrested on Wednesday as an accessory and has been charged with assault.

The Menace to Society gang has become notorious in Melbourne's west after run-ins with police.

The Ecoville Community Park centre in Tarneit was found trashed in January this year and some of the walls tagged with MTS initials.

In December last year, a Werribee Airbnb property rented by four girls was gaetcrashed and trashed by the gang. 

The Ecoville Community Park centre in Tarneit was found trashed in January this year

Ms Chol was partying at a $125-a-night apartment on the 56th floor of a block with a group of young African-Australians in their late teens and early 20s.

A second group crashed the party and a fight broke out, leading to Miss Chol's stabbing around 5am.

A police spokesman said detectives 'do not believe the second group was invited by either the person who booked the apartment, or the deceased.'

About 12 people are assisting police with their inquiries.

It comes after the Homes Affairs Minister released a statement calling for a crackdown on Sudanese gangs in the wake of the death. 'This is a tragic and needless loss of a young life,' he said.

'There is a major law and order problem in Victoria and more people are going to be hurt until the rule of law is enforced by the Victorian Government.

Mr Dutton accused Victorian Premier Dan Andrews of failing to acknowledge the issue of Sudanese gangs. 'He is out of touch and more people will get hurt or worse until the problem is fixed,' he said.

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Security guard left with bloodied face as 16th birthday party in suburban house is 'invaded by African gang'

A security guard was left with a bloodied face after she was violently attacked when a boy's 16th birthday party was gatecrashed.

The event was being held at a home in Edwardes Street, Reservoir, in Melbourne's north, on Saturday night when a group of uninvited youths stormed a back fence.

The gatecrashers were of African appearance, according to witnesses who spoke to the Herald Sun.

'We saw people going in, they started hitting people,' partygoer Salz said.

'They were all guys, there was a lot of them. They had dark skin.'

Police said there were four gatecrashers but witnesses reported there were 20.   

A female security guard at the event who asked the gatecrashers to leave was attacked and suffered injuries to her face. A male security guard was also injured.  

Police were called about 8.30pm, with the gatecrashers fleeing the scene.

The party, which had about 70 teenagers, was being held at the home of a friend of the boy's mother.

The property owner told The Age the gatecrashers smashed down her back fence which adjoined a park.

She said they were at the property for about 10 minutes and appeared to be about 14 to 16-years-old.

'I don't know how many there were, everybody was just scared and they all ran out,' she said. 

Police are continuing to investigate the incident. 

'Police remained in the area and monitored the behaviour of party goers as they left with no further incidents,' a police spokeswoman told the Herald Sun.

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Navy nailed to the wall for PC post

A bearded Australian naval officer holding up his painted pinky finger­nail in hot lolly pink was an absolute money shot for the 100 Days For Change campaigners.

Yet when the Australian navy posted photos of the unlikely poster boy across social media, it didn’t go down well with the troops.

Navy was pilloried for being ­focused on a “politically correct” campaign rather than focusing on the defence of the realm.

The 100 Days For Change campaign was launched this month by Women and Leadership Australia to promote a ­nationwide push among companies for gender ­equity in the workplace. Journalist advocate Tracy Spicer is the public face of the campaign.

NSW RSL president James Brown said last night the navy should never have been dragged into such a loaded political exercise.

“Navy has made great progress in making sure women aren’t unfairly treated,” he said. “But ordering uniformed personnel to join social-activism campaigns is a step too far and risks politicising the defence force.”

Lauding the aims of the campaign on the official navy website, Deputy Chief Mark Hammond said 21.3 per cent of the navy’s workforce was female, “a statistic navy can be proud of, but more needs to be done”.

Rear Admiral Hammond said the navy needed to look at a range of measures — from supporting women’s sporting events to ­reviewing procedures for unconscious gender bias.

“We must do this as one navy, regardless of age, rank, race, ­religion, sexual orientation, ability or gender,” he said. “We cannot afford to leave anyone behind.”

The Defence Department tweeted that the navy had recently become involved in the campaign. “To encourage gender equality and diversity in the workplace, personnel in Sydney painted their pinky fingernails pink as a visual indication of support,” the department said.

The campaign partners include the not-for-profit Australian Gender Equality Council and the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, an Australian government statutory agency.

“What I love about this campaign is the focus on practical change, from the grassroots to the top end of town: action, not words. It will be exciting to see what we are able to achieve,” Ms Spicer said of the campaign.

There are various pledges for change on the campaign website, including from Warrant Officer Gary Wight of the Royal Australian Navy. “I will focus on the strength and increased capability we gain from a truly diverse and inclusive workforce,” he said.

Former Labor leader Mark Latham let loose yesterday. “THIS WILL SCARE THE ENEMY,” he screamed on his Facebook and Twitter feeds. “Sadly, this is not a joke. It is the Australian Defence Force under Marise Payne and Malcolm Turnbull.”

On Mr Latham’s Outsiders Facebook page, it was open ­season. Phil said: @Bullshit! Really! This is the limit! … The services (navy, RAAF, army) need men and women who will fight for our country with devotion and guns, not dresses and hair dryers.”

Rob said: “When I was in the army 30 years ago we thought the navy wore pink nail polish anyway.”

Mr Latham told The Australian the 100 Days For Change campaign was another doomed “PC project”. “These guys are fighting for their country … why engage in pathetic virtue signalling?” he said.

The office of Defence Minister Marise Payne did not respond to inquiries.

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Left struggle with fundamental truths concerning energy debate

Groupthink seems to be preventing many journalists at left-wing media outlets from realising they have been on the wrong side of the renewable energy and power prices story for a decade.

This newspaper argued as far back as the Howard years that a ­renewable energy target was ­incompatible with a carbon trading system designed to produce a market for cost abatement. Then prime minister John Howard and opposition leader Kevin Rudd both took limited trading schemes to the November 2007 election.

Not long after, journalists from Fairfax Media and the ABC began taking issue with The Australian’s criticism of rooftop solar subsidies. We said these would do little to reduce carbon dioxide output from baseload power stations but would dramatically lift prices to consumers too poor to pay for rooftop sets.

Now there is independent proof the left media was wrong. This month the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission and Australian Energy Mar­ket Operator released reports that show The Australian has been right about the effects of ­renewables.

Remember the outcry against the “Carbon Cate” stories by The Sunday Telegraph about the Sydney Theatre Company’s instal­lation of a $4.5 million rooftop solar system at the Wharf Theatre when Cate Blanchett’s husband, Andrew Upton, was director of the STC? Blanchett went on to campaign with other actors in television commercials about ­renew­­­­­­­­­­­­­- ables in 2011 under then prime minister Julia Gillard’s carbon tax.

Today, around the world, rooftop solar feed-in tariff concessions are being unwound, even in Germany, long the poster child for green warriors but a massive user of imported Australian coal and Russian gas to ensure reliable base­load power.

Climate change hysteria reached its peak in the Gillard years. Academics and journalists wrote that as editor-in-chief of this paper I should be charged with crimes against humanity for pointing out the facts: renewables would send industry offshore and play havoc with electricity prices.

Well, power-intensive industries have been sent offshore, where they add more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than they would here because power here is mainly generated from higher-quality, less-polluting coal.

AEMO, distinctly pro-renew­ables, said on July 17 that the nat­ional power market would need to rely on baseload coal-fired power for at least another 20 years and called for policies to extend the lives of power stations nearing the end of their normal operational timeframes. The ACCC report ­released on July 11 said renewables had pushed out dispatchable power and made the network less reliable. Household solar subsidies had been paid for in higher prices to other consumers and business. It backed contributing economics editor Judith Sloan on “the gold plating of electricity networks” by state governments.

But at Fairfax, The Sydney Morning Herald economics editor Ross Gittins was lamenting on May 29 that he really should confine all his columns to discussions of government inaction on climate change. Ignoring the ACCC on coal on July 16, he assembled all the reasons Indian company Adani’s proposed Galilee Basin project in Queensland, which would be the world’s biggest coalmine, would not create jobs.

The Herald’senvironment editor, Peter Hannam, at least reported the ACCC’s findings fairly, but in a comment piece he criticised it for focusing on power prices rather than climate change. Yet Fairfax does not come close to our ABC for renewables evangelism.

ABC Radio National’s Saturday Extra stand-in host Andrew West interviewed ­finance blogger Mich­ael West on July 21 about Adani. Michael West claimed, unchallenged, that the mine would not be economically viable, despite coal prices at six-year highs. India was leading the world in adoption of green power and would be at 55 per cent renewable power by 2030, he claimed.

In fact, India is at 16 per cent ­renewables today and is building 132 new coal-fired power stations according to research by the Australian parliamentary library. Its prospects of ever reaching 55 per cent renewables are remote, as Germany is finding out, struggling to meet its 30 per cent ­reduction target.

At The Drum nightly on ABC TV spruikers for renewables — particularly prominent renewables investor John Hewson and the University of Melbourne’s Simon Holmes a Court — are always given precedence over commentators with rational points about the power market. And for some reason a parade of people who know nothing about electricity generation are regularly given a platform to display their “correct” feelings (rather than facts) about coal and renewables.

Jane Caro flapped her hands wildly on July 9 and pronounced “any suggestions of any new coal-fired power stations is a criminal act”. Do people who say such things know coal is the ­nation’s biggest export earner and 1600 new coal-fired power stations are under construction worldwide this minute? For a historical perspective on the importance of coal to ­hum­anity, Caro could read a piece by global warming believer Bjorn Lomborg in this paper on July 20: “For the well off in both rich and poor countries around the world, lives are enriched by plentiful ­access to energy that provides light, fresh food and clean water … Yet there is a disturbing movement in the West to tell the 1.1 billion people who still lack these myriad benefits that they should go without.”

Taking care of the poor used to be central to the politics of the Left. No more. This is an issue where left-wing journalists always side with the wealthy, like the merchant bankers around the world who invest billions in the government-guaranteed and subsidised global wind power scam.

Anyone who doubts it is a scam should look at why wind subsidies are being dismantled in Europe. This paper published a two-part analysis on the issue by veteran Herald-Sun finance journalist Terry McCrann on July 14 and 21.

McCrann’s first piece analysed prices for wind-generated power the previous weekend in South Australia. Almost all SA’s power that weekend was from wind because it was blowing hard. At one point the price of power hit zero (something that happens regularly in Germany). Across the weekend power averaged $44.89 a megawatt hour. Then the wind stopped and by Monday the price hit $14,000/MWh, “the maximum allowed” in the national market. Across that whole day it averaged $700.60/ MWh.

Wrote McCrann: “How can you build a system on prices which fluctuate from day to day by over $650 a MWh?”

Lomborg wrote here on July 14 outing major nations around the world for announcing heavy greenhouse gas cuts but falling far behind their targets. He argued that even meeting the Paris Agreement global emissions reduction target would mitigate only 1 per cent of forecast global warming this century.

And by 2040, “even with carbon being taxed, the International Energy Agency estimates that ­average coal will still be cheaper than average solar and wind ­energy”. More than $100 billion was being spent globally this year alone on subsidies for solar and wind, “yet this technology will meet less than 1 per cent of the globe’s energy needs”.

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Why students aren’t prepared for life after school

THERE’S a point in adulthood where many of us step back and go, “Christ, I am not prepared for any of this.”

And a lot of it falls on our schooling. We spent years learning to measure the angles of a triangle, but navigating our taxes remains a nightmare. We memorised quotes from every Shakespearean tragedy ever written, but networking events can put the fear of God in us.

The narrative goes that if you study hard, get high scores and land a spot at a good university, you’ll breeze into a decent job.

But worrying research shows this is definitely not the case — and it’s the next generation of workers that face a big struggle.

STUDENTS NOT EQUIPPED FOR LIFE AFTER SCHOOL

Concerning new research has found students are not adequately equipped to brave the workforce, due to an emphasis on school tests like NAPLAN and the ATAR results.

The Mitchell Institute report stresses the importance of teaching about life after school, saying “trade-offs within the curriculum will be necessary”.

The report suggested a key issue was focusing on scores that could be numerically measured, like the National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) and the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) tests, rather than the workplace.

“Narrow proxy measures of academic achievement are made a priority — as demonstrated by the emphasis that many schools place on lifting NAPLAN results and Australian Tertiary ATARs.”

As a result, many young people are disengaging from learning, and failing to hone the life skills necessary for the world outside of school.

News.com.au approached around a dozen university students to ask what they wish they’d learnt in high school.

Lazarus, 23, who is studying a Master of Physiotherapy at the University of Technology, Sydney, said he wished he had learnt more about networking, and knowing the right way to approach prospective employers.

His friend Daniel, doing the same degree, added that he wished he’d been taught how to finetune resumes before starting university.

While most students felt confident doing their taxes, they said “money management” was a big thing they wish they knew, including how to save and what to invest in.

Mitchell Institute Policy Analyst Kate Torii stresses the importance of learning “real world” skills like networking.

“Exposure to the world of work provides opportunities for students to build connections with professionals outside their usual family networks, and to learn by “doing” in real world contexts,” she wrote in The Conversation.

“This offers some valuable benefits — enriching school learning, building students’ employability, and helping them develop the capabilities (such as problem solving, collaboration, and resilience) that we know are valued in work and life.”

‘HUGE SOCIETAL PRESSURE’ FOR HIGH SCORES

This isn’t the first report to address concerns about how we’re failing our students.

Last month, research by Year13 found high school students were focused on picking subjects as a means of maximising their ATAR score — at the expense of expanding their skill sets.

Saxon Phipps, founder and director of Year13, told news.com.au young people believe they can gain a higher ATAR result by choosing easier subjects.

For example, a student who should be doing Extension Mathematics might do the easier General course as a means of scoring higher in that subject.

“There’s a huge societal pressure,” he said. “Even if they don’t use their ATAR score, they’re doing it for the glory that comes with a higher mark.”

In addition to contributing to mental health issues, this meant students weren’t adequately prepared for the outside world upon graduating high school.

And to what benefit? The university dropout rate is higher than ever, with recent Federal Government figures showing that students packing in their degrees has reached its highest levels in a decade.

At the same time, only 71 per cent of graduates were able to secure a job straight out of university, while almost 15 per cent were still unemployed four years after graduating.

In 1986, it took university graduates an average of one year to gain full-time employment. It now takes almost five years.

Earlier this year, Australia’s chief scientist Alan Finkel called for a broader discussion into how the skills students learnt in school could be applied to real life when they graduated.

“The total percentage of people studying advanced mathematics has almost halved between 1992 and 2012, from 16 to 9 per cent,” Dr Finkel told news.com.au. “Maths in particular is a core enabler of all STEM subjects. It’s the language of science.

“There could be some misinterpretation here, but it seems kids are consistently being told to pick subjects that maximise their ATAR rankings.”

He also said every single parent, teacher, student and careers adviser needed to at least understand how the ATAR system worked.

“We want young people to study the most advanced studies they’re capable of, and for the doors of opportunity to remain open,” Dr Finkel said.

“Every time a kid gets the wrong message, that door slams shut.”

A review of the curriculum is expected by 2020.

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Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here