New York:
When you're the single, attractive secretary of state for the United States, you're bound to pick up groupies in all corners of the international diplomatic scene.
But for Condoleezza Rice, who has been linked with diplomats from Rome (the Italian foreign minister, Massimo D'Alema) to London (Foreign Minister Jack Straw of Britain) to Pictou, Nova Scotia (the Canadian diplo-hunk Peter McKay), perhaps the strangest of all has always been Colonel Moammar Gaddafi of Libya.
For reasons known only to Colonel Gaddafi, the now-fugitive Libyan leader took one look at Ms Rice and fell in love. "Leezza, Leezza, Leezza ...I love her very much," he told Al Jazeera in 2007, calling her his "darling black African woman." When Ms Rice visited her suitor in 2008, at the same compound that Libyan rebels are now ransacking back during the brief period when Colonel Gaddafi was in good graces with the United States, the Libyan dictator put his hand against his heart in greeting.
And, as it now comes out, he apparently assembled - or had a minion assemble - a photo album of Ms Rice. Which brings us to the matter at hand today, the ransacking of Colonel Gaddafi's compound under way in the Libyan capital Tripoli.
Rebels going through the Gaddafi compound have unearthed the photo album stocked with Ms Rice's visage on every page. There she is, in one, smiling off to the side, her flip-do accented perfectly for the camera. And there she is, in another, smiling next to you-know-who during that visit to Tripoli. He is wearing a flowing white robe with purple sash and Africa pin; she looks more businesslike in a gray pinstripe suit with white pearls, her flip-do having given way to a page-boy bob.
Since seizing control of Colonel Gaddafi's compound on Tuesday, rebels have made off with several of his prized possessions, including a gold-plated rifle and his golf cart, but perhaps nothing quite as personal as the deposed leader's diplomatic look book.