Ian Smith

Actor Sean Penn was fined $100 and given a suspended 90-day jail term Thursday after pleading no contest to charges that he attacked two British journalists who tried to photograph pop star Madonna outside a hotel. Ian Markham-Smith, 33, a free-lance reporter, and photographer Laurence Cottrell, 30, said Penn attacked them on June 30 outside Nashville's Maxwell House Hotel as Madonna watched.

Lord Pearce, 89, chairman of a government panel that rejected a proposed settlement in the then-rebel colony of Rhodesia on grounds that most blacks opposed it. Pearce, a former senior judge, visited what now is Zimbabwe as head of the government panel in 1972. His presence was regarded as the first genuine and independent outlet for black majority opinion in many years. In 1965, the white-minority government of Ian Smith had declared itself free of all remaining colonial links with Britain.

Donal Lamont, 92, a Roman Catholic bishop expelled from white-ruled Rhodesia in 1977 for opposing its racial policies, died Aug. 14 in Dublin, Ireland, of causes associated with aging. Ordained a priest in 1937, Lamont moved from his native Ireland to Rhodesia in 1946 to establish a Carmelite mission. He was appointed bishop of Umtali in 1957.

Ndabaningi Sithole, the founder of Zimbabwe's ruling party, has died. Sithole died of a heart ailment in a Philadelphia hospital on Tuesday, state television reported Wednesday. He was 80. One of Africa's most prominent black nationalist leaders in the 1960s and 1970s, Sithole founded the Zimbabwe African National Union party in 1963. The party was banned in 1964, and Sithole spent the next 10 years as a political detainee with fellow nationalist leader Robert Mugabe.

Colonial-era names were eliminated Tuesday on most of Zimbabwe's major government buildings as well as districts and rivers, and African ones were assigned. Prime Minister Robert Mugabe's office released a list of the new names, which replace relics of British and white Rhodesian days. For example, the Milton building, housing Mugabe's office, was renamed after an 18th-Century tribal kingdom, Munhumutapa.

Squatters have occupied former Prime Minister Ian D. Smith's farm, Smith's son said--a new development in the months-long takeover of more than 1,000 white-owned Zimbabwe farms by armed squatters who say the land is rightfully theirs. About 50 people moved onto Smith's 4,000-acre cattle ranch Saturday, said his son, Alec Smith. The elder Smith, 81, led the nation from 1965 to 1979, when it was known as Rhodesia and was ruled by a white minority government.

Costa Mesa-based Tickets.com, shoring up its executive ranks, on Friday named Timothy E. Kelly as president. He replaces W. Thomas Gimple, who remains chief executive officer and was named co-chairman of the online ticket provider. Kelly was executive vice president and chief marketing officer. Andrew W. Donkin was named senior vice president of marketing. He had been vice president of marketing. Gimple shares the chairman's title with C. Ian Sym-Smith, who had been chairman.

In Mid-American Conference games: Nate Davis caught the first touchdown pass of his career and threw two more scores to help No. 20 Ball State (8-0, 4-0) to a 38-16 victory over Eastern Michigan (2-6, 1-4) at Muncie, Ind. . . . Ontario Sneed capped a 68-yard drive with a one-yard touchdown run to lift Central Michigan (6-2, 5-0) to a 24-23 win over Toledo (2-6, 1-3) at Toledo, Ohio. . . .

Timothy White Survivor of kidnapping Timothy White, 35, the youngest victim and last survivor of a notorious California kidnapping saga whose rescue offered hope to parents of missing children, died April 1 of an apparent pulmonary embolism, said his stepfather, Roger Gitlin. White was buried Thursday in Newhall, where he had worked as a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy. He lived in the Kern County community of Pine Mountain with his wife and two children.