"We will certainly take the foundation's views into consideration," says a council spokesperson. Art lovers can only keep their fingers - and legs - crossed.. In an open letter to the town board, the foundation's Joram Harel demands it hire a full-time cleaner to keep them in "an odourless state as should always have been the case"."When the sun of culture is low, then dwarves create long shadows," Mr Harel says, concluding his appeal to the New Zealand aesthetic sensibility. He was saying you can take the simplest, most boring, most ugly building and make it into something beautiful."Now the international Hundertwasser Foundation has joined the fray. Insisting that the lavatory should remain in use as lavatory, not as a sterile work of art, the foundation sees the proposed final flush as a crime against art - a "betrayal to Hundertwasser and his legacy to Kawakawa".

He moved to New Zealand in the early 1970s, but continued to design buildings worldwide. The Kawakawa lavatories were his last design to be completed in his lifetime."During construction people would say to him, 'Friedrich, this is much too good for a toilet,'" recalls Richard Smart, his assistant in New Zealand "And he would reply, 'No, no, it must be used as a toilet'. The stories vary, but some claim that the 17 men disembowelled Tubman in his bed and threw his internal organs out the window for the dogs to eat. Doe, at 28, was the eldest member of the group, and promptly declared himself president. Thirteen other ministers were later executed on the beach, in front of the world's press.Ten years later, Doe himself was executed by Prince Johnson, a rival of Charles Taylor. Doe was slowly tortured to death, an event that was filmed, including the cutting off of his ears and his testicles.

The soundtrack is interrupted by demands for his private bank-account number.When Taylor was kicked out last August, he was given a chartered plane for his family and possessions and delivered to a private compound in Nigeria. The local king who did the deal is said to have done so with a gun pointed at his head, and with no idea what the word "sale" actually entailed. This is commonly reported to have been a philanthropic gesture on the part of the Colonisation Society, done so that the freed slaves could go "home". It seems more likely, however, that the slave owners didn't want freed slaves wandering around their American home towns, especially as many of the slaves were their illegitimate children and could start * making all kinds of outrageous demands.