Panel Finds Lawmaker Broke Ethics Rules

The conclusion, released in a statement by the committee late Thursday, confirms in part allegations that contributed to Ms. Berkley’s defeat this year in a bid for a Senate seat. And it serves as an embarrassing coda to her 14-year House career.

House ethics investigators determined that on four instances between 2008 and 2010, Ms. Berkley intervened with officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs and with Medicare and Medicaid officials to inquire about delays in payments for her husband’s Las Vegas-based kidney care practice.

The actions caused “compensation to accrue to the beneficial interest” of Ms. Berkley once the payments took place, which represents a violation of House conflict of interest rules, the statement said.

Ms. Berkley responded in a statement Thursday night that said, in part, that “my actions to save the U.M.C. transplant program were done out of concern for these Nevadans and the committee’s findings put to rest any claims that I acted improperly.”

A special ethics investigative subcommittee — appointed after The New York Times wrote last year about Ms. Berkley’s actions — concluded that there “was no evidence that Representative Berkley acted with the intent to unduly enrich herself,” but it recommended that the findings serve as a notice of “reproval.”

The Ethics Committee did not issue such a formal letter of reproval, and recommended no formal punishment, other than releasing the report.

The Times examined the role Ms. Berkley played in 2008 when she and other members of the Nevada Congressional delegation successfully intervened with Medicare officials to withdraw a plan to close a Las Vegas kidney transplant center at the University Medical Center, where her husband’s practice served as a contract doctor.

Ms. Berkley, the Times investigation also showed, repeatedly intervened on Capitol Hill on behalf of the kidney care industry while her husband, Dr. Larry Lehrner, was chairman of the political action committee of a kidney care trade association.

The Ethics Committee did not find conclusive evidence of a conflict on her actions regarding the transplant center and said over all that it appeared that there was a “lack of malicious intent in violating the rules.”

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West Antarctic Warming Faster Than Thought, Study Finds

A paper released Sunday by the journal Nature Geoscience reports that the temperature at a research station in the middle of West Antarctica has warmed by 4.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1958. That is roughly twice as much as scientists previously thought and three times the overall rate of global warming, making central West Antarctica one of the fastest-warming regions on earth.

“The surprises keep coming,” said Andrew J. Monaghan, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who took part in the study. “When you see this type of warming, I think it’s alarming.”

Of course, warming in Antarctica is a relative concept. West Antarctica remains an exceedingly cold place, with average annual temperatures in the center of the ice sheet that are nearly 50 degrees Fahrenheit below freezing.

But the temperature there does sometimes rise above freezing in the summer, and the new research raises the possibility that it might begin to happen more often, potentially weakening the ice sheet through surface melting. The ice sheet is already under attack at the edges by warmer ocean water, and scientists are on alert for any new threat.

A potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is one of the long-term hazards that have led experts to worry about global warming. The base of the ice sheet sits below sea level, in a configuration that makes it especially vulnerable. Scientists say a breakup of the ice sheet, over a period that would presumably last at least several hundred years, could raise global sea levels by 10 feet, possibly more.

The new research is an attempt to resolve a scientific controversy that erupted several years ago about exactly how fast West Antarctica is warming. With few automated weather stations and even fewer human observers in the region, scientists have had to use statistical techniques to infer long-term climate trends from sparse data.

A nearby area called the Antarctic Peninsula, which juts north from West Antarctica and for which fairly good records are available, was already known to be warming rapidly. A 2009 paper found extensive warming in the main part of West Antarctica, but those results were challenged by a group that included climate change contrarians.

To try to get to the bottom of the question, David H. Bromwich of Ohio State University pulled together a team that focused on a single temperature record. At a lonely outpost called Byrd Station, in central West Antarctica, people and automated equipment have been keeping track of temperature and other weather variables since the late 1950s.

It is by far the longest weather record in that region, but it had intermittent gaps and other problems that had made many researchers wary of it. The Bromwich group decided to try to salvage the Byrd record.

They retrieved one of the sensors and recalibrated at the University of Wisconsin. They discovered a software error that had introduced mistakes into the record and then used computerized analyses of the atmosphere to fill the gaps.

The reconstruction will most likely undergo intensive scientific scrutiny, which Dr. Bromwich said he would welcome. “We’ve tested everything we could think of,” he said.

Assuming the research holds up, it suggests that the 2009 paper, far from overestimating warming in West Antarctica, had probably underestimated it, especially in summer.

Eric J. Steig, a University of Washington researcher who led the 2009 work, said in an interview that he considered his paper to have been supplanted by the new research. “I think their results are better than ours, and should be adopted as the best estimate,” he said. He noted that the new Byrd record matches a recent temperature reconstruction from a nearby borehole in the ice sheet, adding confidence in the findings.

Much of the warming discovered in the new paper happened in the 1980s, around the same time the planet was beginning to warm briskly. More recently, Dr. Bromwich said, the weather in West Antarctica seems to have become somewhat erratic. In the summer of 2005, the interior of West Antarctica warmed enough for the ice to undergo several days of surface melting.

Dr. Bromwich is worried that this could eventually become routine, perhaps accelerating the decay of the West Antarctic ice sheet, but the warming is not fast enough for that to happen right away. “We’re talking decades into the future, I think,” Dr. Bromwich said.

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Bangladesh Finds Gross Negligence in Factory Fire

A government inquiry says criminal charges should be brought against the owner of the Tazreen Fashions factory, where a Nov. 24 fire killed 112 people.

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Pew Study Finds One in 6 Follows No Religion

A global study of religious adherence by Pew Research Center has found that about one of every six people has no religious affiliation, making the “unaffiliated” the third-largest group worldwide.

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