News In Brief

Sakharov film may show earlier on US cable TV

Home Box Office, a cable television outlet, is considering advancing the date for a showing of a film on Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov and his wife, Yelena Bonner, according to an HBO spokesman.

The film is tentatively scheduled for a September airing. HBO has 13 million subscriber homes.

In Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania awarded an honorary doctor of science degree Monday, in absentia, to Mr. Sakharov, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist.

In France Sunday, French Communist leader Georges Marchais said Sakharov, who has been on hunger strike, was undergoing observation in a hospital in the Gorky region. Mr. Marchais added that Soviet authorities had told him the state of health of both Sakharov and Mrs. Bonner was satisfactory.