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Did you celebrate World Toilet Day? The recent holiday is a good reminder to rejoice as you read this article on your phone, maybe even while sitting comfortably on a modern, porcelain toilet, which flushes with water so crystalline clean you could, in hard times, drink it without too much fear of dying. (We do not recommend doing that, by the way.) Going to the toilet wasn't always such a pleasant, risk-free experience for everyone, and even today, many people in America still go without proper sanitation. As recently as 1990, the rural stereotype of dropping trou in a shack...

Delegates at the U.N. General Assembly applauded enthusiastically on Monday as the Palestinian representative to the world body for the first time cast a vote on behalf of the “State of Palestine.” The vote itself—for a judge to serve on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY)—was a relatively minor one, but Palestinian delegate Riyad Mansour called it symbolically significant. … The modern-day State of Israel came into being as a result of a U.N. resolution in 1947, which partitioned the then-British mandated territory into a Jewish and an Arab state. The resolution was accepted by the Jewish...

U.N. to Celebrate ‘World Toilet Day’ The United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution to mark "World Toilet Day." The day will be celebrated November 19.

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. BEIJING - Laugh all you want, say public hygiene experts at the World Toilet Summit, but the importance of having loos you can use is no joke. The three-day event, which began Wednesday in Beijing, is an international commode conference with a mission: the globalization of presentable latrines. "People are saying 'We want good toilets!' because toilets are a basic human right and that basic human right has been neglected," said Jack Sim, founder of the World Toilet Organization, a co-sponsor of the summit. "The world deserves better toilets." Some 150...

The Chinese capital, notorious for its smelly lavatories, will show off its ambitious plan to improve them during the fourth annual World Toilet Summit later this month, the Beijing government said Friday. "Toilets represent a country's level of development, it reflects a place's level of material and spiritual civilisation," Yu Debin, deputy director of the Beijing Tourism Bureau, told a press conference. Beijing has already invested more than 200 million yuan (24 million dollars) since 2001 on upgrading and building more than 700 new public toilets to prepare for the 2008 Olympic Games, he said. "The toilet problem at many...

PORT OF SWEET GRASS, Mont. - Jesse Huffman insists he didn't do it on purpose, but the toilet he left plugged after "nature called" at this border crossing in north-central Montana has him facing criminal charges. Toole County authorities charged the 19-year-old college student from Great Falls with criminal mischief after a border agent accused him of intentionally clogging the toilet. Huffman said the clogged piping was completely unintentional, the result of an urgent, but natural bodily function. "I've never been arrested before or anything like that, and I get arrested for taking a dump," said Huffman, a student at...