Qatar

Qatar, a glittering peninsula of skyscrapers and sand, reminds one of a well-dressed, ambitious little guy playing all the angles in a rough neighborhood. Its pushy rise to prominence is creating suspicion and hardening the Middle East split between moderate U.S. allies and more militant nations.

A proposal by Occidental Petroleum Corp. to build a refinery on Panama's Pacific Coast moved closer to reality this week with the signing of a memorandum of understanding with Qatar's state oil company to form a partnership to build the $7-billion project if feasibility studies prove positive. In a signing ceremony Tuesday in Panama City attended by Panamanian President Martin Torrijos, executives of Westwood-based Occidental and Qatar Petroleum Co.

U.S. forces in Qatar accidentally fired a Patriot missile at a farm in the Gulf state but it caused no injuries, the Pentagon said. The U.S. military is investigating the launch from the anti-missile system. "Those things are not supposed to accidentally discharge," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said. Whitman said the missile was fired into an unpopulated area. It was fired during a training exercise, said Army Lt. Gen. Carter Ham, director of operations for the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Last year's mystery buyer of Mark Rothko's "White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose)," 1950, sold by David Rockefeller and acquired anonymously at Sotheby's for $72.8 million, has been revealed to be Qatar's ruling al Thani family. The sale holds the record for the highest price ever paid for a work of postwar art at auction. London's Art Newspaper reported Sunday that the emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani, and his wife, Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser al Missned, likewise purchased Francis Bacon's "Study From Innocent X" for $52.7 million at the same sale.

Qatar has teamed up with Robert De Niro and other founders of New York's Tribeca Film Festival to host a similar annual event starting next year in the small, oil-rich Persian Gulf nation. The announcement is part of a broader trend of rival, wealthy Gulf countries launching high-profile cultural and sporting events to attract international attention and outside investment. The festival in Qatar next November will be modeled after the original in New York City, which is going into its eighth year.

Royal Dutch/Shell Group, Europe's second-largest oil company, will build its first liquefied natural gas plant in Qatar for about $6 billion to help meet surging demand for the fuel, Qatargas Managing Director Faisal M. Suwaidi said Sunday. Under an agreement with state-run Qatar Liquefied Natural Gas Co., or Qatargas, the plant will chill natural gas for export in tankers, producing enough -- 7.8 million tons a year -- to power almost 8 million homes.

A car bomb tore through a theater popular with Westerners in Qatar on Saturday, killing one person, officials said. Twelve people were injured in the blast in the capital, Qatar's Interior Ministry said. It gave no other details. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast. The British Foreign Office confirmed that the fatality was a British national, but did not identify the victim. "One building at the theater collapsed. There was pandemonium in the area.

Qatari authorities Sunday blamed an Egyptian for the suicide car bombing of a theater that killed one Briton and injured 12 other people. Saturday's blast came days after a man purporting to be Al Qaeda's leader in the Persian Gulf called for attacks on Western interests. It was unclear if the attack was related to that call. Qatari authorities identified the suicide bomber as Omar Ahmed Abdullah Ali, an Egyptian computer programmer for the state-owned Qatar Petroleum Co.

Qatar said it has awarded a $2.5-billion contract to California-based construction firm Bechtel Corp. to design and build a new airport. Abdul Aziz Noaimi, chairman of Qatar Civil Aviation Authority, said the project would be implemented in three phases, costing a total of about $5 billion. Bechtel, of San Francisco, will handle the first phase.

The Persian Gulf nation of Qatar on Thursday announced the arrest of two Russians as suspects in the recent assassination of an exiled Chechen separatist leader. Moscow confirmed that the two were intelligence agents but proclaimed their innocence and blasted Qatar for the action. It is a "provocation," said Russian Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov, for the Arab country to link the Russian agents to the Feb.