After a similar incident and President Macron's advocacy of the freedom to print caricatures of Prophet Muhammad, three people were stabbed to death in a church in Nice, France, in 2020.

French President Emmanuel Macron has stated that he understands why Muslims were outraged by cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. It comes after a deadly knife assault on a church in Nice, the country's third alleged Islamist incident in less than a month. A dispute has erupted with certain Muslim nations over the subject of the drawings. Some have called for a boycott of French products, despite Mr. Macron's defense of the right to use the pictures in the framework of free expression.
Related On This Day

Tsar Nicholas II of Russia provides civil rights and approves the first Duma in the "October Manifesto" of 1905. (Parliament)

In 1999, the worst Indian Ocean tropical super cyclone strikes Odisha, India, killing 9,885 people and reaching wind speeds of 300 miles per hour.

On his 37th birthday in 1997, Argentine soccer great Diego Maradona announces his retirement from the game.

A radio broadcast of H. G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds," narrated by Orson Welles, supposedly sparks a worldwide panic in 1938.

In 2019, Kashmir formally loses its autonomous status, flag, and constitution as India reasserts federal sovereignty over the region, thus abolishing its statehood.

Diego Maradona, an Argentine soccer forward, was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1960.

In 1926, magician Harry Houdini [Erich Weisz] dies in Detroit from gangrene and peritonitis caused by a burst appendix.

Rene Goscinny's "Asterix" is originally published in the French magazine "Pilote" in 1959, drawn by Albert Uderzo.

Christopher Columbus, the Italian adventurer and navigator who found the "New World" for Spain and launched European colonialism, was born in the Republic of Genoa on or around this day in 1451.