FIRST OFF . . .

The Federal Communications Commission has blocked live cable-TV broadcasts of programs from the Soviet Union, officials of the 14-million-subscriber Discovery Channel said. The channel said the FCC rejected a request late last week for a temporary license to take the programming transmissions off Soviet satellites and rebroadcast them. Channel officials say they still are delivering about nine hours a day of Soviet television programming, but most of the programs are not being delivered to an American audience at the same time they are broadcast to the Soviet Union. The FCC said the cable network left too little time to notify Intelsat, the international cooperative that operates the global communications satellite system.