March 18, 1991

As Albania stumbles from its Stalinist past, a distant footfall is heard in parts of New York. "It was like a dream," Dr. Sami Repishti said, recalling how his telephone rang on Long Island one morning last year -- 23 years after the Albanian authorities, having outlawed religion and private cars, cut their citizens' communications with the outside world. "I could not believe it when I heard my brother's voice. It brought hopes to me that Albania would one day be democratic."

Former Mayor Edward I. Koch vividly recalls when, as a Congressman, he was invited to lead one of New York City's first Ukrainian parades. "I turned to the grand marshal," Mr. Koch said yesterday, "and I told him, 'If this was the old country, I wouldn't be walking. I'd be running down Fifth Avenue and you would be running after me.' "

Undefeated and top-ranked Nevada-Las Vegas led 16 teams into the regional semifinals of the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament with a 62-54 victory over Georgetown yesterday. U.N.L.V. (32-0) will next play Utah in a West Region semifinal in Seattle on Thursday. The presence of the Runnin' Rebels, the most dominating team in college basketball this season, in the tournament quarterfinals was not surprising.

Kuwait's economy, far and away the strongest among the oil-producing countries before the Iraqi invasion in August put it into a coma, is expected to revive and move back to boom times within two years, say many economic and financial experts on the region. In scores of interviews here in the last week, Kuwaiti, American and Western financial specialists, including business executives and economic planners, estimated that the cost of reviving the emirate's economy, including the devastated oil industry, would be far less than earlier estimates.

The economic boom that unity brought to western Germany is expected to slow significantly this year under the combined weight of eastern Germany's severe economic decline, recession in other industrialized nations and the cost of Germany's contribution to the Persian Gulf war. But economists say eastern Germans' undiminished appetite for products from the west will keep western German growth well ahead of that in the United States and most European nations.