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Of course, pundits frequently argue that sport and politics should be kept separate, but that surely becomes a pretty remote consideration when you think how much could be achieved by using the games for public protest.

Many Tibetan students, labour activists and Tibetan nationalists have been arrested, tortured and “disappeared” by the current regime.

If we add to this the flooding of homes on the Yangtze river in the 1990s during the building of the Three Gorges Dam, and the murder and the widespread torture of members of the Fallon Gong religious sect, China has a very large catalogue of human rights abuses.

Indeed, the many past Olympic games protests, such as the Black Power salutes and the boycotting of apartheid South Africa, all helped to effect important political changes.

We need only think back to Mohammed Ali’s vociferous support for black rights to know just how much a sportsman can acheive.

It was an awful shame, then, that few used the 2000 Sydney Olympic games for political protest, and that most of the British press ignored the plight of the Australian Aborigines who lived in squalor close to the stadium.

They could, for example, have mentioned that life expectancy for aboriginals is around 20 years lower than white Australians, and that male suicide rates are among the highest for any of the world’s ethnicities.

They could also have shown that Cathy Freeman was far from a typical aboriginal athlete.

Countless exemplary black Australian sports people were segregated from white athletes and refused access to decent facilities. Some even died in poverty and despair.

John Howard’s government was, at the time, the only “Western” country to be branded racist by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, and continued to resist human rights reforms.

People – the majority – come above a sports event, particularly when their human rights have been violated.

It is our moral duty, then, to protest at the top of our voices, even if this does ruin the games for everybody else.

In my view sport and politics should never mix, but I accept that sometimes they will and often do (maybe governing bodies like the International Olympic Committee, could take a leaf from football’s governing body’s, FIFA, book and suspend member nations from international competition if their national government intervenes with the running of the committee.)

Back to the idea that we shouldn’t boycott the games – athletes have trained for years for this moment in their carreer and for their government to pull them out at the last minute is unfair.

As Andy rightly points out, mobile phones are almost limitless in their potential. For designers, it’s about assessing what the public want and need, rather than what they can conceivably add to a phone.

People will snap up iPhones fast, and most will be glad they did. And that’s what it’s all about.

Since the Second World War there has hardly been an Olympics that has been free from political issues. The most notable instances were during the Cold War, when the 1980 Moscow Games and those in Los Angeles four years later were boycotted by opposing sides (initially over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan).

South Africa was excluded for a long period during apartheid and countries including Spain and Switzerland didn’t go to Melbourne in 1956.

And let’s not pretend that this problem lies in the dim-and-distant past, as the Atlanta Games of 1996 were hit by a bomb in the main Olympic park.

Add in black power salutes, the hostage-taking at Munich and of course Hitler’s Games, and it’s easy to see how the world stage offered by the Olympics prove an irresistable tool for those with political points to make.

It was ever thus, and will be so again in the future.

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/science-%26-technology/apple-forced-to-recall-iphone-after-toaster-fault-20070628245/