Stink is history as public toilets get ready for Games

Lester Blake is happy, but not for any breakthrough in his engineering profession. His source of happiness is a clean and tidy public toilet, with an automatic hand drier, soap, and, most important of all, toilet paper.

"When I first came to Beijing in 2000, the biggest problem for me was not finding tissue paper in public toilets quite different from what it is in Germany and many other Western countries," the 40-plus German said yesterday.

The Beijing municipal government has improved the capital's public facilities vastly, thanks to the preparations for the Olympic Games.