Londoners witnessed a momentous occasion yesterday as up to a million cycling fans descended on the city’s streets to witness the start of the Tour de France, 2007.

For the very first time the world’s largest spectator event had come to London. From Trafalgar Square, down Whitehall, the 189 competitors sped past Downing Street, Big Ben and Parliament before turning the corner to Westminster Abbey. Buckingham Palace came into sight on the left as they shot through Wellington Arch into the royal parks. By this point the favourites were reaching an average speed of 54km per hour.

As they headed up towards the grey balloon floating above The Mall indicating the end of the race, the crowds screamed and cheered. After all they were watching an historic occasion.

For its competitors Le Tour de France, 2007, is a gruelling 2,218 mile race. For London it is a cultural phenomenon. Yesterday hundreds of thousands came to watch the prologue - a time trial to decide who will wear the coveted yellow jersey. Gone were the cars, taxis and buses - instead crowds lined the route three deep.

In Parliament Square crowds lay on the grass, drinking cans of beer and glasses of wine. There was a sea of colour as people collected stripy hats, inflatable T-shirts and foam hands being given out for free. They sat in between the tents put up by anti-war protesters and watched the race on a big screen, jumping to their feet as the athletes sped past.

One man dressed in a black tracksuit shifted from foot to foot nervously as he watched his favourites on the screen, shouting ‘he’s done it! He’s done it!’

Elsewhere family and friends used the event as an excuse to meet up in the city. One large group had come together from Hinkley in Leicestershire, Newark in Nottinghamshire and Birmingham.

Nine-year-old George Lowndes banged together two pink inflatable T-shirts as the cyclists came past. It was his first-ever trip to London.

‘It was supposed to be a secret that we were coming but my dad couldn’t keep it,’ said George. ‘I could not stop smiling. I’ve never been on a train or a tube.’

His mother, Anita, added: ‘It is a fantastic experience and people have come from all over the world.’ She was right.

Viktor Tihhonova, 56 and his wife Larrisa, 52 had flown in from Estonia. ‘The city is so lucky,’ said Larrisa. Meanwhile, Vivian Edlund, 49 had brought her son, Asger, 13 to England from Denmark for a cycling holiday. They talked about how enthusiastic people were about the sport on the continent.

‘English people think we are crazy for cycling so much,’ said Asger.

That attitude was not apparent in London yesterday. Fans lined up at ‘official stores’ that were vans parked on the street filled with merchandise.

Others milled along the edge of Horse Guards Road where the team buses were parked and athletes were warming up.

One man bent over a bike with a tape measure checking the height of the seat to the exact millimetre. Elsewhere workers fiddled with tyres, handle-bars and frames. German rider Bert Grabsbsch climbed on to his turbo-trainer - something which allows athletes to cycle on the spot. Dressed in a pink lycra top and black shorts he started warming up under the glare of dozens of fans.

‘You can be so close to the athletes,’ said Luuc Eisenga, the team manager. ‘The day before you can even ride the course. Can you imagine trying to play football with your friends at Wembley the day before England play?’

One of his riders, Mark Cavendish from the Isle of Man said he did not think Le Tour de France would set off from London again in his career.

This is only the 16th time the race has begun outside France and just the third time in Britain. Today, the first stage of the tour will begin in London and end in Canterbury.

Waiting at the finish line will be Daniel Felstead, a 31-year-old designer from Hackney, east London. He also watched the time trials yesterday from Hyde Park corner and plans to head to the Pyrenees for the later stages of the race. ‘Cycling is an example of the extremes of what the human body can do in a competitive sense,’ said Felstead. ‘The tour is the epitome of that. Watching it live is such a different experience that heightens all the senses and turns it into a spectacle.’

That was certainly the case yesterday. Terry Sweeney had brought his eight-year-old son, Cameron, from Oxford to watch the race. Both were backing the two great British hopes: Bradley Wiggins and David Millar .

In the end Wiggins had the best British time, coming fourth. The winner was the Swiss Fabien Cancellara who rode the course in an amazing eight minutes and 50 seconds.

Everyone seemed determined to keep the mood jubilant and not allow the ongoing drugs scandals to overshadow the sport. Last year many of the top athletes were banned before the race began thanks to the Operation Puerto investigation. Even after the cut-down the overall winner of the tour, Floyd Landis tested positive for testosterone and is now waiting for the outcome on his final appeal - insisting that he is innocent.

In-fighting is common over whether teams should sign an ethical charter. This year organisers of The Tour de France have given them no choice. All competitors have had to sign an anti-doping agreement from the International Cycling Union. It is a battle that organisers insist they can win.

Where to see today’s action

Watching the Tour de France will be far less gruelling than sweating out the 200km route yourself. Here are some of the hottest places to soak up the atmosphere.

Greenwich, London

The riders set out from the Mall, but there’ll be more excitement at the race start outside the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.

Start time: 11am Kms to go: 203

The Star and Eagle, Goudhurst, Kent

Perhaps the ideal viewing point: a 15th- century, half-timbered pub with good food, at the top of an idyllic village high street which is also the stage’s second big climb .

Bikes whizz past: 1.45pm Kms to finish: 82

Tenterden, Kent

The High Street, where riders will be hoping to pick up ’spint points’, is the best spot for the casual observer.

Bikes whizz past: 2.15pm Kms to finish: 62

Farthing Common

The third and final hill of the daymay see some decisive racing action. But there’s not much in the way of easy viewing points - you’ll have to cling to a tree on the steep banks on either side of the road to see much.

Bikes whizz past: 3.10pm Kms to finish: 20

Rheims Way, Canterbury

Stage one will almost certainly come down to a frenzied sprint finish, keen cycling fans will probably want to catch the action first-hand.

Bikes whizz past: 3.37pm

Travelling to the race

In London, Westminster Bridge, Blackfriars, Southwark, London Bridge and Tower Bridge will be closed.

Roads around Trafalgar Square, Parliament Square, Waterloo and the City will be closed.

Go to «www.tfl.gov.uk» or call 020 7222 1234 for more information.

South Eastern Trains is operating an extended service in Kent, but roads around all the stations on the route will be closed. Go to «www.southeasternrailway.co.uk» or call 0845 000 2222.

(12-03) 11:52 PST CAIRO, Egypt (AP) —

Hundreds of civil servants protested Monday in front of Egypt’s Cabinet, demanding wage increases to cope with rising prices and inflation.

Police barred the protesters, who work for Egypt’s Tax Agency, from nearing the Cabinet building or the nearby labor union, at times lifting metal barricades to push back against the crowd.

“Where is social justice?” about 500 protesters chanted. One banner read, “The oldest tax agency is starving to death.”

Egypt has seen its worst labor unrest in decades, with several hundred strikes in the past year. The biggest have been in the northern city of Mahalla el-Kobra, where textile workers went on strike last year and again in September to protest low wages and soaring inflation.

In September, the World Bank ranked Egypt as the world’s most improved economy for investors in 2007, helped by wide-ranging economic reforms. The country has had an average growth rate of 7.2 percent for the last three years, double what it had been.

But government officials have acknowledged in recent months that the improving economy has not trickled down to the majority of Egypt’s 77 million people.

Inflation soared to 12 percent from December 2006 to September, up from a low of 3.4 percent just a year before. The government says it now stands around 8 percent, though independent economists put the real rate at about twice that.

At least 200 instances of labor strikes and protests took place in 2006, according to the Center for Trade and Union Services, a non-governmental organization.

The government has taken a relatively softer stance with workers than it generally does with activists demanding more democracy and freedom.

Unemployment remains officially at 12 percent, and the poverty level more than 20 percent, according to the World Bank.

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Associated Press Writer Nadia Abou el-Magd contributed to this report

(12-03) 11:37 PST WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. (AP) —

Blake Lewis checked an e-mail on his iPhone and gasped.

“Rough cut of the video!” he announced, and quickly a half-dozen 19 Entertainment employees gathered around a computer screen at the “American Idol” production company’s slick offices above Sunset Boulevard.

Lewis watched himself singing in front of a wavy purplish background in the clip for “Break Anotha,” the uptempo first single from his first album. “It’s good!” somebody volunteered after the video played a second time.

“For a rough draft,” Lewis muttered. “The effects could be more stylized at the beginning.”

No, the 26-year-old beatboxer from Seattle is not another just-happy-to-be-here “American Idol” finalist. Given a long-awaited shot at a major label album release with his second-place finish (Jordin Sparks was the winner), he’s trying to exercise as much artistic control as possible in the Simon Fuller-created machine.

He co-wrote all but one song on “Audio Day Dream,” out Tuesday on Arista Records, and is already plotting a remix album to add hip-hop and electronica flavors that he favors but wasn’t able to include.

“I just call myself a communicator. And all’s I wanna do is communicate my art,” he told The Associated Press. “And now with this album, I get to communicate myself wholeheartedly without any hiccups or speed bumps, like ‘American Idol’ has, you know?” Here, he dryly affects a TV announcer voice: “Theme weeks!”

Lewis got an early start on the love-hate relationship that “Idol” alumnus like Kelly Clarkson have had with the show and their post-”Idol” handlers.

The hate part, in fact, began before he considered auditioning. He found the singing contest flipping through channels several years ago and could only watch a few seconds of painfully off-tune crooning.

“I saw this, people that cannot perform, they’re just standing there singing. The camera’s zooming in and out and stuff. I’m like, ‘Cool, the cameras are doing their job,’” Lewis told The Associated Press. “What’s the artist doing? What’s this dude who’s been singing karaoke his whole life doing on this television show? So I turned it off immediately. I was disgusted. And I never watched it since.”

Lewis beatboxed and sang for a living for more than four years after graduating from high school. When no record deal materialized, he began working construction to support his music habit. An only child, he converted his father’s barn into a $30,000 studio, caulking windows and doing metal fabrication to pay off the loan. Under the name Bshorty, he looped his beatboxing and sang at regular weekday gigs at local venues.

Which brings us to the love part of his relationship with the show. In September 2006, a day after playing a show at the Triple Door club in downtown Seattle, he tried out for “Idol” at the urging of a friend. Lewis realized he could sell himself to 20 million to 30 million people every week. That potential audience was too tempting to pass up.

“The machine of ‘American Idol’ was great for me, because it was just too much fun for me,” he said.

Like other musically experienced contestants (think Chris Daughtry), he made the show work for him Д not the other way around.

“Idol” music director Rickey Minor said Lewis was more involved in creating his own take on the music than any other contestant Minor had worked with.

“He may not have been the most talented, but he was definitely the most progressive,” Minor said. “His approach and his vision for what he wanted to project was clear from the start.”

On “Audio Day Dream,” what Lewis does in 16 tracks is, in his words, is “electro-break funky soul pop music.” To get there, he enlisted the aid of hitmaker JR Rotem (on “What’cha Got 2 Lose?”), Fiona Apple collaborator Mike Elizondo (on “1,000 Miles”) and Timbaland protege Ryan Tedder, frontman in the rock band OneRepublic. The album was recorded largely while Lewis was on the road this summer with the “Idol” tour, which he called “tedious and long.”

“Gots To Get Her” is Lewis’ most ready-for-radio next single, borrowing and reforming Irving Berlin’s “Puttin on the Ritz” melody to craft embarrassingly effective fluff.

The urban flavor seen in his “Idol” back-and-forth with Doug E. Fresh is in short supply on the CD. There’s just one guest rapper, Lupe Fiasco, on the celebrity crush tune “Know My Name.”

“I was hoping for more hip-hop flair. It comes down to the time thing and the release date,” Lewis said. “I didn’t get as much beatboxing on there as I wanted to. You know, next record. Me and Doug E. were trying to get together and get maybe Black Thought, Talib or Mos Def. I wanted to do like a cipher track.”

Whether or not he gets to make that next record, Lewis feels he already has one leg up on fellow “Idol” alumnus, some of whom have disappeared from the pop scene after disappointing first-album sales.

“They didn’t get to do their own album,” he said. “They didn’t write any of their own music. And a lot of people didn’t really want mainstream success. Like Taylor Hicks, I don’t think he really wanted success at all even though he got first on ‘American Idol.’ Katharine McPhee didn’t get to make the album she wants.”

Of “Audio Day Dream,” he says: “I made the album I wanted to make. … I put all this hard work and creativity into this one piece. It was the right album at its time.”

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On the Net:

«www.blakelewisofficial.com»