The U.S. Senate yesterday gave its blessing to key members of President Obama's science team, including an ecologist who will be the first woman and first marine scientist to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The Senate voted unanimously to confirm Harvard physicist John Holdren as Obama's top science adviser and Oregon State ecologist Jane Lubchenco as administrator of NOAA, an agency that does much of the nation's climate-change research, forecasts the weather and regulates commercial fishing.

PARK WEAPONS RULE BLOCKED

WASHINGTON — A federal judge yesterday blocked a federal rule allowing people to carry concealed, loaded guns in national parks and wildlife refuges.

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly's ruling halts a change in regulations issued in the waning days of the Bush administration and orders further review. She set an April 20 deadline for the Interior Department to respond to the injunction.

INDIAN LAND CLAIM UPHELD IN BRAZIL

BRASILIA, Brazil — Brazil's Supreme Court sided yesterday with Amazonian Indians in a land dispute that turned violent last year when authorities tried to evict rice farmers from a government-decreed reservation.

The court ruling upholds the 4.2 million-acre Raposa Serra do Sol reservation for 18,000 Indians who lay claim to ancestral land, despite a handful of large-scale farmers who also occupy the territory in the jungle bordering Venezuela.

EX-TSA WORKER ADMITS THEFTS

HACKENSACK, N.J. — A former baggage screener at Newark Liberty International Airport confessed yesterday to stealing up to $400,000 worth of cameras, computers, cell phones and other gear from passengers' luggage.

Pythias Brown, 47, told a federal judge he pilfered the items between September 2007 and October 2008 while employed by the Transportation Security Administration.

SOLDIER IN IRAQ REPORTED DEAD

BAGHDAD — The U.S. military says an American soldier has died from noncombat causes in Iraq. A statement issued today says the soldier died yesterday. It doesn't give more details, but the soldier's division operates in an area south of Baghdad.