That's what Bloomberg does... in possibly the most bizarre feature I've read in ages.

Local authorities say they can't afford to maintain and modernize restrooms. Many have been sold to property developers, who convert them into more profitable uses, including apartments and nightclubs.

So London, while replete in white-tiled apartments and nightclubs, is cruelly lacking in facilities compared to Beijing (despite the national salary there being just a tenth of London's). Why Beijing is singled out, and what the average national salary has to do with anything, I don't know.

There's more:

Sean, who has been driving a black cab for 10 years, keeps a plastic bottle handy in case he needs to urinate at an inconvenient moment.

That's right, Sean, you explain to the Bloomberg journalist why you've a bottle of piss in the cab. She'll believe anything. And it gets worse:

Others take more drastic steps. Research by ENCAMS, an environmental charity, showed 95 percent of Britons had urinated, vomited or defecated in public because no toilet was available.

Don't be naive. They were just saying they'd defecated in public because, you know, they wanted to sound cool.

Christ... embarrassing... no wonder so many Americans think Oliver Twist's a contemporary thriller.

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