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R. Nataraja Mudaliar

Keechaka Vadham (The Extermination of Keechaka) is an Indian silent film produced, directed, filmed and edited by R. Nataraja Mudaliar (pictured), and released in the late 1910s. No print of it is known to survive. The first Tamil film and the first film to be made in South India, it was shot in about five weeks at Mudaliar's production house, India Film Company. The screenplay by C. Rangavadivelu is based on an episode from the Virata Parva segment of the Hindu epic Mahabharata, focusing on Keechaka's attempts to woo Draupadi. The film stars Raju Mudaliar and Jeevarathnam as the central characters. Keechaka Vadham was commercially successful and received positive critical feedback. The film's success prompted the director to make a series of similar historical films that laid the foundation for the South Indian cinema industry. His works were an inspiration to other filmmakers, including Raghupathi Surya Prakasa and J. C. Daniel. (Full article...)

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British tennis player Emma Raducanu (pictured) wins the US Open, becoming the first qualifier to win a Grand Slam title.
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A prison fire in Tangerang, Indonesia, kills at least 46 inmates and injures 75 others.
Carlos Vila Nova is elected President of São Tomé and Príncipe.

On this day

September 14

French in Moscow, 1812

AD 81 – Domitian, the last Flavian emperor of Rome, was confirmed by the Senate to succeed his brother Titus.
1812 – French invasion of Russia: Following the Battle of Borodino seven days earlier, Napoleon and his Grande Armée captured Moscow, only to find the city deserted and burning (depicted).
1901 – Theodore Roosevelt became President of the United States at age 42, the youngest person ever to do so, eight days after William McKinley was fatally wounded in Buffalo, New York.
1954 – In a secret nuclear test, a Soviet Tu-4 bomber dropped a 40-kiloton atomic weapon just north of Totskoye village, exposing some 45,000 soldiers and 10,000 civilians to nuclear fallout.
2019 – Drone attacks on major processing facilities at Abqaiq and Khurais forced Saudi Arabia to cut more than half of its oil production.

Franz Bopp (b. 1791)
Paul Poberezny (b. 1921)
Faith Leech (d. 2013)

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Today's featured picture

The red-backed shrike (Lanius collurio) is a carnivorous passerine bird and a member of the shrike family, Laniidae. It breeds in a range stretching from western Europe eastwards to central Russia, and it overwinters in the eastern areas of tropical and southern Africa. About 17 centimetres (7 inches) in length, it feeds on large insects, small birds, frogs, rodents and lizards. Like other shrikes, it hunts from prominent perches, and impales corpses on thorns or barbed wire as a "larder". This male red-backed shrike was photographed at Lake Kerkini in northern Greece.

Photograph credit: Antonios Tsaknakis

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