FRANCE:He was invited for three days, but the Libyan dictator Muammar Gadafy decided he would stay five. After all, he's having his Bedouin tent - heated against inclement French weather - set up in the garden of the guest residence across the street from the Élysée Palace. He may as well get the use out of it.
Gadafy's visit is merely official, a notch less prestigious than the state visit he doubtless would have preferred.
He will be met at Orly airport today by Brice Hortefeux, France's minister for immigration and national identity, and there will be no parade. He will see President Nicolas Sarkozy later today and again on Wednesday.
Sarkozy spokesman David Martinon says the Guide (Gadafy's official title) will not sleep in the tent - it is for him to receive his guests in. Sarkozy will not go to the tent; he did that in Tripoli on July 25th. In Paris, the president receives chez lui.
Somehow the stain of two decades of hostage-taking, bombings, a nuclear weapons programme (stopped in December 2003 after Gadafy saw what happened to Saddam), not to mention widespread and continuing human rights abuses, just doesn't seem to go away.
France has two excuses for cozying up to Gadafy: everybody's doing it and, in the words of Sarkozy, Paris needs "to fight our budget deficits".
Neither the US nor Britain has yet admitted Gadafy to their countries; full rehabilitation in Washington is reportedly the Guide's real goal.
Some 446 civilians were killed in the twin bombings of a Pan Am flight over Lockerbie in 1988 and a UTA flight over Niger in 1989.
Six high-ranking Libyan officials are still wanted, after they were convicted in absentia by a Paris court of involvement in the UTA bombing.
With vast oil and gas reserves, Libya is set to invest $100 billion (€62.3 billion) in infrastructure.
Gadafy's son, Seif al-Islam, the most presentable member of an odd family, told Le Figaro newspaper this weekend his father would sign contracts for "more than €3 billion worth of Airbuses, a nuclear reactor and a lot of military equipment" this week.
Libyan largesse extends to negotiating to buy the Rafale, a lemon of a fighter-bomber that has so far been rejected by all potential foreign buyers.
Sarkozy sounded annoyed when reporters at the EU-Africa summit in Lisbon asked why he had invited Gadafy to Paris.
"If we don't welcome countries that take the path of respectability, what should we say to those who do the opposite?" the French president asked.
"Libya financed terrorism, pursued a nuclear weapons programme and imprisoned the Bulgarian nurses," Sarkozy continued.
In July, he sent his ex-wife Cécilia to Tripoli to escort five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor to Sofia. They had been tortured and held hostage for 8½ years.
"As for the rest," Sarkozy said with a facial expression that said, "nudge, nudge, wink, wink", "he has his personality, his temperament. I'm not going to judge them.
"He says what he wants and I say what I want."
Gadafy's speech at Lisbon University on Friday didn't facilitate the sticky visit for Sarkozy.
Gadafy said it was "normal for the weak to resort to terrorism" against "super powers" and demanded that former colonial powers "compensate the people they colonised and whose riches they plundered".
The opposition socialist and human rights groups have expressed outrage at Gadafy's visit.
The Libyan leader will reportedly arrive with an entourage of hundreds, in three or four aircraft. He is to meet the speaker of the National Assembly, "cultural personalities", representatives of the African community, prominent French women and the business management group Medef.
On Friday, the eve of his departure, he will visit the Château de Versailles.