[custom_adv] Oxford Street was brought to a standstill as hundreds of Muslims marked the festival of Ashura with a peaceful procession and signs denouncing terrorism and Islamic State. [custom_adv] Ashura is the 10th day of Muharram, the first and holiest month in Islam. It also marks the day the three Abrahamic religions believe Moses and the Israelites were saved from the Pharaoh by God parting the Red Sea. For Shia Muslims, the remembrance of Ashura commemorates the death of Muhammed’s grandson, Husayn ibn Ali, at the Battle of Karbala. [custom_adv] London is one of the leading global cities in the arts, commerce, education, entertainment, fashion, finance, healthcare, media, professional services, research and development, tourism and transportation. [custom_adv] It is the world's largest financial centre and has the fifth or sixth largest metropolitan area GDP in the world. London is often regarded as a world cultural capital. It is the world's most-visited city as measured by international arrivals and has the world's largest city airport system measured by passenger traffic. [custom_adv] The march is hosted in the city of London each year, UK's capital is the world's leading investment destination, hosting more international retailers and ultra high-net-worth individuals than any other city. [custom_adv] London's universities form the largest concentration of higher education institutes in Europe. In 2012, London became the first city to have hosted the modern Summer Olympic Games three times. [custom_adv] London has a diverse range of people and cultures, and more than 300 languages are spoken in the region. Its estimated mid-2016 municipal population (corresponding to Greater London) was 8,787,892, the largest of any city in the European Union and accounting for 13.4% of the UK population. [custom_adv] London contains four World Heritage Sites: the Tower of London; Kew Gardens; the site comprising the Palace of Westminster, Westminster Abbey, and St Margaret's Church; and the historic settlement of Greenwich (in which the Royal Observatory, Greenwich defines the Prime Meridian, 0° longitude, and GMT). [custom_adv] Over the years, the name has attracted many mythicising explanations. The earliest attested appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, written around 1136. [custom_adv] Modern scientific analyses of the name must account for the origins of the different forms found in early sources Latin (usually Londinium), Old English (usually Lunden), and Welsh (usually Llundein), with reference to the known developments over time of sounds in those different languages.
