Warsaw

A Polish man got the shock of his life when he visited a brothel and spotted his wife among the establishment’s employees. Polish tabloid Super Express said the woman had been making some extra money on the side while telling her husband she worked at a store in a nearby town.

A Polish crime writer has been jailed for 25 years after authorities found he had committed a murder that had been described in one of his thrillers, officials said on Wednesday. In his 2003 book Amok, Krystian Bala described in detail the brutal murder of a Polish businessman.

Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski revealed on Thursday that he doesn’t have a bank account and instead hands his salary over to his mother. "I still don’t have a bank account," the 57-year-old conservative premier said in an interview with the weekly news magazine, <i>Wprost</i>. "I’m not joking. I keep my money in Mum’s account," he said.

The Nazis used human fat to make soap during World War II in a Nazi German medical academy located in what is now the Polish Baltic sea port city of Gdansk, Polish war crimes prosecutors confirmed on Friday, pointing to new laboratory tests.

Prosecutors in overwhelmingly Catholic Poland have asked priests to read out the names of drink-drivers from the pulpit as part of efforts to reduce the country’s high road death rate. Church leaders have not said yet whether they will support the scheme, aimed to shame drivers into sobriety.

A Polish priest with a penchant for a bet has slipped out of his parish in the central Polish town of Lowicz, taking with him the collection box, local press reports said on Thursday. The faithful at the Holy Spirit parish in Lowicz were a bit bemused at not seeing Father Franciszek Augustynski since mid-May.

Polish education inspectors have banned a CD with a painting by Hieronymus Bosch reproduced on its cover from being distributed in schools, saying the picture, entitled <i>Hell</i>, could harm young people. "There are pornographic scenes in the Bosch picture that can damage people," said one school inspector.

A university in Poland has banned an exhibition of T-shirts bearing slogans such as "I didn’t cry when the Pope died" and "I’ve got Aids," saying the show was too provocative, press reports said on Tuesday. "The texts printed on the T-shirts could have offended the feelings and beliefs of many people," said Wieslaw Kaminski, president of UMCS University.

Poland’s Roman Catholics expressed outrage on Thursday after a magazine published a picture of the much-revered icon of the Black Madonna with pop icon Madonna’s face transposed on to it. Ultra-Catholic daily newspaper Nasz Dziennik slammed the photo as ”another act of profanation of sacred symbols”.

Bone-chilling weather claimed dozens of lives on Monday across Europe as glacial temperatures swept the Baltics to the Balkans, brought rare snowfalls to Istanbul and sparked a scramble for heating fuel. The unusually low temperatures have left well more than 100 fatalities in Germany, Poland, Russia, Turkey and the Czech Republic.

An unknown gay rights group claimed it planted a dozen fake bombs around Warsaw that paralysed the Polish capital on Thursday, three days before the second round of a presidential election. ”You paralyse our life, we’ll paralyse yours,” a lengthy e-mail sent to media groups in Warsaw said, referring among other issues to a ban on a gay pride parade by Warsaw Mayor Lech Kaczynski.

Poland’s left-wing government, led by Prime Minister Marek Belka, resigned on Wednesday as the Lower House met in a brief first session following its solid shift to the right in last month’s elections. President Aleksander Kwasniewski accepted the resignation at a ceremony at the presidential palace later on Wednesday.

Europe has never been so strong, safe or united, Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski told leaders from across the continent as he opened the Council of Europe’s ”unity” summit at Warsaw’s Royal Castle on Monday. ”Never before has Europe been so strong, so safe, so close to being united,” Kwasniewski said.

Belgium’s Kim Clijsters reached the quarterfinals of the WTA clay-court tournament in Warsaw, Poland, on Wednesday, defeating 18-year-old Maria Kirilenko of Russia 6-2, 6-1. Clijsters dominated most of the match, conceding her serve just once, immediately after taking a 2-0 lead.

As an unfortunate quirk of fate would have it, the avenue that runs through the heart of the Polish capital, Warsaw, bearing the name of native-born Pope John Paul II is a high holy place for sex shops, a Polish newspaper pointed out on Wednesday. The avenue’s residents have repeatedly asked city authorities to intervene.

The parents of newborn Polish triplets — all boys — have named their sons Jan, Pawel and Karol, in homage to Pope John Paul II, the babies’ father said on Thursday. ”At this very special time, we wanted to pay homage to the pope, and we thought our sons would be happy to have these first names,” the father said.