BUSINESS NOTES.

CONAGRA TO PAY $8.3 MILLION FINE: The agribusiness giant will pay $8.3 million in fines and penalties as part of a plea agreement to charges farmers were cheated at its grain elevators in Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky, federal authorities said.

ConAgra was charged with wire fraud, a felony, and three misdemeanor charges - misgrading grain, misweighing grain and adulterating grain. Four former employees and two grain samplers have also agreed to plead guilty in the case.

ConAgra ``systematically cheated'' farmers out of money by misgrading soybeans and by adding water to grain, making it heavier and thus falsely inflating its value when sold to other companies, Roger Viadere, the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, told an Indianapolis news conference Wednesday.

IBM, BANKS TO UNVEIL ON-LINE SYSTEM: International Business Machines Corp. and a consortium of banking partners are unveiling an on-line banking system to compete with two powerful rivals in the fledgling field.

Integrion Financial Network, a group of 16 banks plus IBM, will publish its Gold Standard for Electronic Financial Services on Tuesday on the Internet, said Emily Mendell, manager of planning and communications for the Atlanta-based Integrion.

Gold Standard competes with two other major systems, the Open Financial Exchange, or OFX, system created by Intuit Inc., Microsoft Corp. and CheckFree Corp.; and Visa International's ADMS bill payment system.

PEPSI IS CHOICE OF BASEBALL GENERATION: Pepsi is now the official soft drink of Major League Baseball even though rival Coca-Cola products will be the only sodas fans can buy in most major-league ballparks, including Dodger Stadium.

Baseball's first national sponsorship deal since the 1994 strike is with the Pepsi-Cola Co., the second-biggest U.S. soft drink maker, Pepsi announced Wednesday.

The industry leader Coca-Cola Co., a longtime sponsor of baseball, has local arrangements making its products available exclusively in 24 of the 28 major-league ballparks. Pepsi is in the remaining four.

CABLE TO FIGHT MURDOCH'S `DEATH STAR': The cable industry will marshal its forces against rival Rupert Murdoch's plan to beam hundreds of TV channels - including local TV stations - into people's homes via satellite, cable giant Ted Turner declared Wednesday.

``We're going to make it as tough for him as we possibly can. Kind of like the Russian army did with the German army,'' said Turner, Time Warner Inc. vice chairman, who just ended his term as head of the National Cable Television Association.

Murdoch's latest venture, a $1 billion stake in a Denver-based direct broadcast satellite company, EchoStar Communications Corp., is being referred to as ``Death Star'' by cable executives.

SEARCH ENGINES PROMOTE NEW MODELS: Attempting to help consumers navigate the World Wide Web while also providing a strong base for advertisers, two of the largest on-line search sites are moving toward something that looks more like television and newspapers.

Excite Inc., a popular search engine company that now calls itself an ``Internet navigation network,'' and Netscape Communications Corporation and Yahoo! Inc. made dual announcements Wednesday.

Excite said it would institute what it called a ``channel model'' beginning in April, while Netscape and Yahoo

announced the launch of a navigation site that would organize the wealth of information available on the Web into eight information categories.