  A review of the measurements of hadron, flavour-tagged and lepton-pair
production cross-sections and lepton-pair forward-backward asymmetries
performed by the four LEP experiments ALEPH, DELPHI, L3 and OPAL at energies
between 130 and 183 GeV is given. All 183 GeV results are preliminary. The
searches by the four collaborations for new physics phenomena like contact
interactions and compositeness, exchange of R-parity violating sneutrinos or
squarks, leptoquarks or additional heavy gauge bosons Z' are summarized. No
evidence for deviations from the Standard Model expectations is found and new
or improved limits are derived.
