Over 1,000 tourists, including some Western and Chinese visitors, and scores of cable car workers were trapped Sunday when a faulty part caused the popular attraction to grind to a halt, officials said.

Almost 90 people were travelling on the cable car — which is on the island’s second-highest peak and offers panoramic views over the palm-fringed tourist hotspot — at the time of the accident.

The majority were at the top of 700-metre (2,300-foot) Mount Machinchang, or at a station halfway down.

Twitter user Pricillia posted a picture of the stationary cable car up on the hill, with the message: “Worst experience ever”.

Those on the attraction were left hanging precariously for three hours before rescuers brought them down at about 9:00 pm by operating the cable car manually.

“People were nervous and fearful but when they saw the firefighters arriving, they clapped and began to smile,” Langkawi fire and rescue chief Mohamad Hisham Ibrahim told AFP.

The cable car was fixed at about 11:00 pm after a faulty bearing was replaced, allowing rescuers to bring down the remaining tourists and workers in batches, with the operation ending after midnight, Hisham told AFP. None were injured.

It was reported to be the most serious accident to hit the attraction, which bills itself as the one of the world’s steepest cable cars, since it started operating in 2003. The operator pledged a thorough investigation.

Langkawi, off the west coast of northern Malaysia, attracts hordes of domestic and foreign tourists to its pristine beaches and jungle-clad valleys.

Soldiers and local officials found 259 kilogrammes (571 pounds) of crystal methamphetamine and 120 kg of opium in a sweep of the illicit drugs factory spread across 34 buildings near Lwalkhan, a village in war-hit Shan state near the Chinese border.

The army statement, posted on the commander-in-chief’s Facebook page, also listed in rare detail the seized drug-producing equipment and precursors, including hundreds of barrels of acid and diesel, 750 bags of caustic soda, 22 freezers, 12 generators and huge caches of caffeine and other chemicals.

“The Tatmadaw (military) seized the drugs in the raid and cooperated with the drug enforcement police team. The legal process is still ongoing,” a senior police officer from the anti-drug department told AFP on the condition of anonymity.

The bust took place in Kutkai township, where a record seizure last month brought in 30 million meth pills, two tonnes of “ice” — crystal meth — and heroin, with an estimated combined value of $54 million.

The raids come as the military continues its seasonal offensive against ethnic minority armed groups in the lawless border areas.

Last week alone, clashes between the army and rebels in Kutkai and neighbouring Hseni township displaced some 870 civilians, according to the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Myanmar’s conflict-riddled northeast is a hub for Asia’s meth producers, who pump out narcotics that are showered across Southeast Asia and beyond.

Drugs trafficking fuels much of the fighting between the army and the ethnic rebels — both of whom are accused of profiting from the illicit trade.

Myanmar is the second-largest opium producer in the world after Afghanistan, although a surge in demand for meth has caused a slump in poppy cultivation in recent years.

Rights groups accuse the military and armed groups of extrajudicial killings, torture and the recruitment of child soldiers.

The video features controversial rapper Wee Meng Chee, known by his stage name Namewee, sitting on a chair in front of a domed building and mimicking barks of canines from around the world.

Several black-clad dancers wearing masks of dogs — an animal considered unclean in Islam — gyrate around him, with two of them mimicking a “doggy-style” sex move.

The video, which marks the start of the Year of the Dog currently being celebrated across Asia, generated accusations that it was filmed in front of a mosque in the administrative capital Putrajaya.

National police chief Mohamad Fuzi Harun reportedly said a probe had been launched into the artist — who is from the country’s ethnic Chinese minority — for hurting religious feelings and “transmitting offensive communications”.

Namewee, who is reported to be abroad, faces up to a year in jail if found guilty.

In a YouTube video, the rapper denied having insulted Islam and said that the domed building visible in the background was the prime minister’s office, not a mosque.

“The reports saying I insulted Islam are not true,” he said. “We did not film the music video at any place of worship. It was done in an open area.”

The probe was launched after complaints from Muslim groups and public criticism from the deputy prime minister over the video, which has more than 700,000 views on YouTube since being released on February 10.

Lunar New Year is a major celebration in Malaysia, where a quarter of the population are from the Chinese diaspora, but the Year of the Dog has proved sensitive.

Some shops have avoided displaying canine imagery in their decorations for fear of causing offence.

Namewee has repeatedly been at the centre of controversy. In 2016, he was detained for several days for allegedly insulting Islam over a video partly filmed inside a mosque.

Malaysia generally practises a moderate form of Islam but religious tensions have escalated in recent years, with concerns growing over a rise in conservative Islamic attitudes.

George Christensen put up the image on Saturday showing him in a shooting stance with the comment “You gotta ask yourself, do you feel lucky, greenie punks?”.

He claimed it was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the “Dirty Harry” film franchise in which a police officer played by Clint Eastwood takes on “people who are conducting illegal activity, such as the greens are”.

The MP has been critical of environmentalists — sometimes backed by the Greens political party — who have tried to blockade mining projects, including chaining themselves to machinery.

The Facebook post was referred to the Australian Federal Police by the Greens, with their Senator Sarah Hanson-Young saying on Twitter she had received an emailed threat from one of Christensen’s supporters.

“Frankly, guns are not a joke and particularly in the wake of the massacre in the US only last week, 17 people shot dead, including children,” Hanson-Young told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull called the post “very inappropriate”. It was also widely criticised by politicians from other parties.

Christensen, whose National party is the junior partner in the government’s ruling coalition, later deleted it but responded defiantly, saying: “I’m not going to be moralised to by these extreme greens who put the livelihoods, safety and lives of other people at risk.”

He said the post had nothing to do with the American shooting last week where a 19-year-old killed 17 people at his former high school, claiming instead it was a comment on environmentalists’ “illegal activism on mine sites”.

Australia has tough gun laws that include bans on certain weapons, a minimum age, licences and secure storage, after a mass shooting at the historic Tasmanian colonial convict site of Port Arthur in 1996 where 35 people were killed.

The uproar is the latest headache for the ruling Liberal-National coalition, with Turnbull last week publicly criticising Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce for his affair with a younger former staffer who is now pregnant with his child.

The “March for Our Lives” will take place on March 24, with sister rallies planned across the country, a group of students told ABC News’ “This Week.”

They pledged to make Wednesday’s slaughter in Parkland, Florida a turning point in America’s deadlocked debate on gun control.

Nikolas Cruz, 19, a troubled former student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, confessed to killing 17 people with a legally-purchased AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, the latest such atrocity in a country with more than 30,000 gun-related deaths annually.

Among the students announcing the march was Emma Gonzalez, who captured worldwide attention with a powerful speech in which she assailed President Donald Trump over the multi-million-dollar support his campaign received from the gun lobby.

She vowed Stoneman Douglas school would be “the last mass shooting.”

On Sunday, Gonzalez, 18, urged politicians to join a conversation about gun control — citing Trump as well as his fellow Republicans Florida Senator Marco Rubio and Governor Rick Scott.

“We want to give them the opportunity to be on the right side of this,” she said, as she and her four classmates called on students nationwide to help push the message.

White House ‘listening session’

Gonzalez and other Stoneman Douglas students were scheduled to be part of a nationally televised, prime-time “town hall” event on CNN on Wednesday. Rubio, who has attracted criticism for accepting millions in political help from pro-gun groups, tweeted that he would participate.

That same day, Trump will host a “listening session” with high school students and teachers, the White House said in a statement, though it did not specify who would attend.

The president met Sunday with top Republican lawmaker Paul Ryan, discussing “the recent tragedy in Parkland, Florida,” among other topics.

Singling out links between politicians and the powerful National Rifle Association, Stoneman Douglas student Cameron Kasky said any politician “who is taking money from the NRA is responsible for events like this.”

“This isn’t about the GOP,” he said, referring to the Republican Party. “This isn’t about the Democrats.”

The NRA, a traditional ally of the Republicans who currently control Congress and the White House, defends a literal view of the US Constitution’s 2nd Amendment which promises a right “to keep and bear arms.”

Even after last October’s killing of 58 people by a gunman in Las Vegas who amassed 47 firearms to commit the worst mass shooting in recent US history, legislators accomplished nothing in the way of tighter controls.

Accusing the NRA of “fostering and promoting this gun culture,” Kasky said the students seek “a new normal where there’s a badge of shame on any politician who’s accepting money from the NRA.”

‘They want action’

“People keep asking us, what about the Stoneman Douglas shooting is going to be different, because this has happened before and change hasn’t come?” said Kasky.

“This is it,” he continued. “We are going to be marching together as students begging for our lives.”

The students did not indicate how many people they expected to join their rallies.

But their aims won support from Florida Democratic Congressman Ted Deutch, who said they can make a difference.

“After what they saw, the worst things imaginable, they’re not going to just sit back and take it,” he told “This Week.”

“All I’ve heard all week is how frustrated people are with rhetoric. They want action.”

Florida Republican Congressman Carlos Curbelo, speaking on the same program, said he is working towards bipartisan solutions that could prevent similar tragedies.

“There are a lot of Republicans who are prepared to support reasonable, common-sense gun safety laws,” he said.

Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff said that although Republicans have faced a bigger hurdle in making gun control a priority, “it’s been a challenge in the Democratic Party as well.”

Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Schiff asked, “How much more of this are we gonna to take? How many more shootings?”

Congress has to get “off its backside” to “stare down the NRA and do the right thing,” he said.

The student survivors’ calls for change “should matter,” said Mark Kelly, a retired astronaut whose wife, former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, was shot and wounded by a deranged gunman.

He said on “Fox News Sunday” that the student activists “are going to vote on this issue probably for the rest of their lives and they’re going to encourage others to do that as well.”

But conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, speaking on the same show, said neither legislation nor marches are the answer.

“It’s not the fault of the NRA,” he said, calling for concealed weapons to be allowed in schools.

“If we are really serious about protecting the kids, we need a mechanism to be defensive.”

AFTER SPENDING days roaming the streets of Houston, Texas, the sprawling, one-storey buildings with their massive footprints were ubiquitous. The offices of Elijah Rising, in their nondescript brown building on the Southwest Freeway, appeared to be no exception – except as the former quarters of Angela, a so-called “day spa” where six Thai sex workers, the victims of human trafficking, had been forced to work.

“They were never able to realise they were victims,” said Samantha Hernandez, social enterprise director of Elijah Rising, an NGO fighting to end human trafficking and social exploitation, as she led a bus tour in her office’s Houston neighbourhood.

Without Hernandez’s guidance, it would be impossible for outsiders to know that some of the buildings, otherwise indistinguishable from their neighbours, have been closed after being discovered to host brothels. Others are still in business.

In regards to its present quarters, Elijah Rising, which seeks to raise religious awareness and takes an activist approach, intervened with the property owner in 2013 and the brothel operators were evicted.

The building hosts offices of the NGO but also an exhibition and replica of Angela Day Spa, showing the living conditions in which the Thai victims were forced to live.

Inside behind the tinted windows, the trappings of a brothel are more apparent. An ATM is on the premises, as brothels normally do not accept credit cards. A more sinister aspect is a surveillance room, which is meant to enable control over the sex workers, while a seedy feature is a special spray bottle to hold condoms.

“The pimp was a Korean and he was part of a big sex trafficking ring,” Hernandez said. “Being that, his control methods were very efficient.

“When I started talking about sex trafficking, [the victims] just thought ‘I’m an illegal alien, speak little English and won’t have any luck’.”

Samantha Hernandez

Uncovering illegal businesses such as Angela’s, however, only exposes the tip of the iceberg in terms of the total number of victims being trafficked in a sex industry that is underground by its very nature. Given that East Asia and the Asia-Pacific are the points of origin from which most people are trafficked to the United States, it is no surprise that Asian brothels are over-represented in Houston’s landscape.

“We also see a lot of Mandarin-speaking, Thai and Korean sex workers, and also Vietnamese,” she said.

That demographic of victims does not only apply to Houston. Four hours away by air, a nondescript Thai massage parlour, again with blackened windows, is easily spotted in the East Hollywood neighbourhood of Los Angeles.

“Most massage parlours here operate legally. But you’ll hardly know if they do anything ‘backstage’,” said attorney Panida Rzonca as she led a tour around the area’s “Thai Town”.Legitimate massage parlour in Thai Town, claimed by the Thai CDC to be helpful with assistances

The six blocks of Thai Town in East Hollywood, known for authentic Thai cuisine, including durian, is also ground zero for assistance for Thai trafficking victims. The federal government-funded Thai Community Development Centre (Thai CDC) operates in the area, but while organisations such as Elijah Rising take an active role confronting sex traffickers, the Thai CDC mainly offers support to victims once they are rescued from exploitative conditions.

Panida, the organisation’s lead attorney, recently assisted victims of a sex trafficking ring that was exposed in Minnesota last year. About 1,000 Thai women had been forced into sex work and victimised.

The Thai CDC’s job includes providing temporary shelter, assisting former victims to apply for “T” visas, which allow certain trafficking victims and their families to remain and work temporarily in the US, and providing English language education.

Most former victims end up working in restaurants or legitimate massage parlours.

“Most victims choose to continue making money in the US, not only for the economic opportunity but also because they are scared about their family members’ welfare if they are found back in Thailand,” Panida said.

“Victims are most likely traumatised by their traffickers’ threats that they will harm their loved ones back home if they are ever found to have escaped,” she added.Banner of a Thai massage parlour in Houston

While Hernandez indicated that Thai victims feared being confronted by US authorities for illegally entering the country to work legally, another legal source working with Thai victims, who asked to remain anonymous, said some had |entered the country through legal channels.

“But what was illegal was their registration procedure and the treatment they received – which we call modern-day slavery,” the source said

“If they entered the US illegally, that is counted as violating administrative law, while in trafficking they become the victims of violations of criminal law. This knowledge should be disseminated so that no one fears coming to authorities if their rights are infringed.”

The Thai CDC started working on the Minnesota case in 2016 with the cooperation of Thai authorities and the diplomatic corps in the US, but their role was generally limited.

“As attorneys in the US, we have a strong sense of the confidentiality of the victims. We can’t even inform Thai authorities whom we are helping,” she said. “Thai embassies and consulates here also appear to not have legal teams of their own to work on these kinds of cases.”

Thai CDC founder and executive director Chanchanit Martorell also said more cooperation between Thai authorities and NGOs should be encouraged to pursue prosecutions.Chanchanit Martorell

“We have exchanged information with Thai agencies. Yet many of our requests to them are not resolved,” Chanchanit said “It’s crucial to give victims a fair chance in the justice system, not only for their rights and humane standards, but also to encourage future victims to step forward,” Chanchani added. “[Justice] shouldn’t be realised at a mere face-saving, surface level.”