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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No Clear Link Between Cancer and 9/11 Debris, New York Health Dept. Study Finds

The study was by far the largest to date. It examined 55,700 people, including rescue and recovery workers who were present at the World Trade Center site, on barges or at the Staten Island landfill where debris was taken in the nine months after Sept. 11, 2001, as well as residents of Lower Manhattan, students, workers and passers-by exposed on the day of the terrorist attacks.

Over all, there was no increase in the cancer rate of those studied compared with the rate of the general population, researchers concluded after looking at 23 cancers from 2003 to 2008. The prevalence of three cancers — multiple myeloma, prostate and thyroid — was significantly higher, but only in rescue and recovery workers and not in the rest of the exposed population. But since the number of actual cases was small and the subjects of the study may have been screened more frequently for cancer than other people on average, the researchers noted that it was too early to draw any correlation to time spent at ground zero.

In one of many counterintuitive findings, the incidence of cancer was not higher among those who were exposed more intensely to the toxic substances than among those who were exposed less.

The lack of clear evidence of a link between cancer and the debris from Sept. 11 casts into doubt the decision by the federal government in June to add 50 different types of cancer to the list of illnesses covered by the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, signed by President Obama in early 2011. That decision meant that people with other sicknesses linked more strongly to ground zero were likely to receive less money.

Dr. Thomas A. Farley, the health commissioner in New York City, said in an interview on Monday that it was too soon to take the study as a repudiation of the government’s decision.

“Cancers take 20 years to develop,” Dr. Farley said, “and we might see something different 20 years down the line.” But echoing Dr. John Howard, head of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, who made the final decision on covering cancer, the commissioner added, “You don’t want to wait 20 to 30 years to get a definitive answer” to people suffering today.

On Tuesday, Dr. Howard issued a statement that said, “The W.T.C. Health Program welcomes this addition to the peer-reviewed scientific literature, and we have long encouraged the growth of such peer-reviewed research.”

Dr. Alfred I. Neugut, an oncologist and professor of epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, said he was not surprised by the study. “I think, given the time frame and the exposures,” he said, “that there wasn’t a high likelihood that there would be an elevated risk, certainly for cancer, and to the degree that it was, it would not be for the cancers that they’re finding.”

Dr. Neugut said he sympathized with people who had cancer they attributed to the disaster, but added that their emotional response was not necessarily valid scientifically. “The 9/11 attack was a terrible thing, but it doesn’t cause everything in the world,” he said. “Cancer is a very specific outcome, and in most exposures, you have to be exposed for an extended time before you get the cancer.”

Initially, the money set aside by the law — $2.8 billion to compensate victims and $1.5 billion for monitoring and treatment costs not covered by health insurance — covered mainly respiratory illnesses. (Mental health problems were included in the treatment fund but not the compensation fund.) Studies by the city health department have found asthma and post-traumatic stress disorder to be linked to the 2001 attacks. But cancer is expected to be far more expensive to treat than other qualifying illnesses, and the economic loss caused by cancer could require more compensation, since many cancer patients cannot work, and some have died.

The study was released on Tuesday, and was to be published in the Wednesday issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association — too late to influence Dr. Howard’s decision, but perhaps not too late to influence public opinion going forward or to affect whether Congress will decide to replenish the victim compensation fund should more money be needed.

The fund has not yet begun making payments, and it is supposed to make its final payments in 2016-17. In the meantime, some police officers and other rescue and recovery workers who worked at ground zero and have cancer have been receiving enhanced pension benefits based on a 2005 state law that said they were presumed to have contracted cancer from the ground zero substances.

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Bangladesh Finds Gross Negligence in Factory Fire

“The owner of the factory cannot be indemnified from the death of large numbers of workers from this fire,” Main Uddin Khandaker, the official who led the inquiry, said in an interview. “Unpardonable negligence of the owner is responsible for the death of workers.”

The Nov. 24 fire at the Tazreen Fashions factory, where workers were making clothes for global retailers like Walmart and Sears, has focused attention on the unsafe work conditions and low wages at many garment factories in Bangladesh, the No. 2 exporter of apparel after China. The fire also has exposed flaws in the system that monitors the industry’s global supply chain: Walmart and Sears say they had no idea their apparel was being made there.

Mr. Khandaker submitted a 214-page report to Bangladesh’s Home Ministry on Monday, saying that the factory owner, Delowar Hossain, and nine of his midlevel managers and supervisors prevented employees from leaving their sewing machines even after a fire alarm sounded.

Mr. Hossain could not be reached for comment.

The report also stated that the fire was “an act of sabotage,” but it did not provide any evidence.

Some labor advocates found that explanation unconvincing. “They don’t say who did it, they don’t say where in the factory it was done, they don’t say how they learned it,” said Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, a monitoring group in Washington. “Regardless of what sparked the fire, it is clear that the unsafe nature of this factory and the actions taken by management once the fire started were the primary contributors to the horrendous death toll.”

Bangladeshi officials have been under intense domestic and international pressure to investigate the blaze and charge those deemed responsible. Families of the victims have demanded legal action against Mr. Hossain. Labor advocates have argued that the global brands using the factory also shared in the responsibility for the tragedy.

Fires have been a persistent problem in Bangladesh’s garment industry for more than a decade, with hundreds of workers killed over the years. Mr. Khandaker said his inquiry recommended the creation of a government task force to oversee regular inspections of factories and uphold the rights of workers.

Bangladesh has more than 4,500 garment factories, which employ more than four million workers, many of them young women. The industry is crucial to the national economy as a source of employment and foreign currency. Garments constitute about four-fifths of the country’s manufacturing exports, and the industry is expected to grow rapidly.

But Bangladesh’s manufacturing formula depends on keeping wages low and restricting the rights of workers. The minimum wage in the garment industry is $37 a month, unions are almost nonexistent, and garment workers have taken to the streets in recent years in sometimes violent protests over wages and work conditions.

Workers at Tazreen Fashions had staged small demonstrations in the months before the fire, demanding wages they were owed. On the night of the fire, more than 1,150 people were inside the eight-story building, working overtime shifts to fill orders for various international brands. Fire officials say the fire broke out in the open-air ground floor, where large mounds of fabric and yarn were illegally stored; Bangladeshi law requires that such flammable materials be stored in a room with fireproof walls.

The blaze quickly spread across the length of the ground floor — roughly the size of a football field — as fire and toxic smoke filtered up through the building’s three staircases. The factory lacked a sprinkler system or an outdoor fire escape; employees were supposed to use interior staircases, and many escaped that way.

But on some floors, managers ordered workers to ignore a fire alarm and stay to work. Precious minutes were lost. Then, as smoke and fire spread throughout the building, many workers were trapped, unable to descend the smoke-filled staircases and blocked from escape by iron grilles on many windows. Desperate workers managed to break open some windows and leap to the roof of a nearby building and safety. Others simply jumped from upper floors to the ground.

“We have also found unpardonable negligence of midlevel officials at the factory,” Mr. Khandaker said. “They prevented workers from coming down. We recommend taking proper legal measures against them.”

Mr. Khandaker listed a host of violations at Tazreen Fashions: managers on some floors closed collapsible gates to block workers from running down the staircases, the ground-floor warehouse was illegal and the building’s escape plan improper, and the factory lacked a required closed-circuit television monitoring system. None of the fire extinguishers in the factory appeared to have been used on the night of the fire, suggesting poor preparedness and training.

Moreover, Mr. Khandaker said, the factory lacked a required fire safety certificate. It had applied for an annual renewal, but a certificate had not yet been issued.

Asked about the allegation of sabotage, Mr. Khandaker said that investigators had found no evidence of an electrical short circuit, and that eyewitnesses had suggested possible foul play. He said the report recommended a full criminal investigation into the matter.

“It seems to us that it was sabotage,” he said. “Somebody set the fire.”

Julfikar Ali Manik reported from Dhaka, and Jim Yardley from New Delhi. Steven Greenhouse contributed reporting from New York.

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