COMMENT Those who claimed that Anwar Ibrahim's acquittal by the High Court last week on a charge of sodomy was a game-changing move must have felt, after the Attorney-General's Chambers filed a notice of appeal yesterday, rather like North Korea's nuclear disarmament interlocutors in recent years.

Just when we discern some sign of softening on the part of the communist world's first dynastic regime, a South Korean frigate is sunk off the coast of the Korean peninsula, or Pyongyang test fires a missile, or commits some such travesty.

Then, what vestigial hopes the North had managed to keep alive in its adversaries are recognised as chimerical before the rogue regime begins another cycle of ‘now you see my softer side, now you don't.'