angry tapir writes: Just over 17 years since the project launched, and more than 18 years since the last release of the operating system that inspired it, the open source Haiku OS is nearing a beta release.

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Rebel commanders say offensive has not yet started despite escalation that killed at least six civilians.

Dutch government says the siblings, who have lived in the Netherlands for 10 years, could remain in the country.

Demonstrators across the planet say that too little is being done to combat climate change to ensure a stable future.

InfoWorld described the move as a "breakthrough": As expected, Python has climbed into the Top 3 of the Tiobe index of language popularity, achieving that milestone for the first time ever in the September 2018 edition of the index. With a rating of 7.653 percent, Python placed third behind first-place Java, which had a rating of 17.436 percent, and second-place C, rated at 15.447. Python displaced C++, which finished third last month and took fourth place this month, with a rating of 7.394 percent... Python also has been scoring high in two other language rankings: - The PyPL Popularity of Programming Language index, where it ranked No. 1 this month, as it has done before, and has had the most growth in the past five years. - The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings, where Python again placed third. Tiobe notes that Python's arrival in the top 3 "really took a long time," since it first entered their chart at the beginning of the 1990s. But today, "It is already the first choice at universities (for all kinds of subjects for which programming is demanded) and is now also conquering the industrial world." In February Tiobe also added a new programming language to their index: SQL. (Since "SQL appears to be Turing complete.") "Other interesting moves this month are: Rust jumps from #36 to #31, Groovy from #44 to #34 and Julia from #50 to #39."

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Russian and Iranian presidents give green light for all-out offensive on Idlib, the rebels' last stronghold in Syria.

On Sunday haruchai (Slashdot user #17,472) wrote that a 200-year-old museum in Brazil "is burning to the ground and it's likely the entire collection of some 20 million artifacts will be lost." Now CNET reports: The items in the Museu Nacional in Rio may be gone, but Wikipedia doesn't want them to be forgotten... "Did you take a photo of any of them? Help us preserve the memories of as many as we can and add them to @wikicommons," Wikipedia tweeted Tuesday, with an explanation on how to do so... "The fire at the National Museum of Brazil has led to the devastating loss of 200 years of memory," Katherine Maher, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, said in a statement. "At Wikipedia, our community is hard at work every day curating a living record of our shared heritage," Maher said. "With this effort, we're asking people everywhere to join our global community and help the world recover from this collective tragedy." Wikipedia's tweet included an image urging people to "Add your photo to the sum of all knowledge..."

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The vote on Sunday will be Sweden's first since 163,000 migrants were allowed into the country in 2015.

An anonymous reader quotes the Tampa Bay Times: In April last year, the Florida Department of Corrections struck a deal with JPay. The private company, spearheading a push to sell profit-driven multimedia tablets to incarcerated people across the country, would be allowed to bring the technology to every facility in the nation's third-largest prison system. But there was a catch. Inmates had already been purchasing electronic entertainment for the last seven years -- an MP3 player program run by a different company: Access Corrections. For around $100, Access sold various models of MP3 players that inmates could then use to download songs for $1.70 each, and keep them in their dorms.... More than 30,299 players were sold, and 6.7 million songs were downloaded over the life of the Access contract, according to the Department of Corrections. That's about $11.3 million worth of music. Because of the tablets, inmates will have to return the players, and they can't transfer the music they already purchased onto their new devices... The Department of Corrections, meanwhile, has collected $1.4 million in commissions on each song downloaded and other related sales since July 2011... JPay already operates banking accounts and facilitates phone calls at the state-run prisons, charging inmates and their loved ones steep fees for the services. With the introduction of tablets, JPay will add a wide swath of new spending incentives for its incarcerated customers, offering purchases of music, emailing and other virtual fare. As a compromise, prison officials offered to download the already-purchased music to a CD, and then mail that CD to someone outside the prison. For a $25 fee.

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Obrador will take office in December, but Mexicans have high expectations hoping he will be a leader who listens to the people.

The oil-rich southern city remains on edge, with 12 deaths since Tuesday and burning of Iran consulate.

At least 11 killed and 50 wounded in missile attack on Iranian Kurdish party offices in Koya, reports say.

Who are the main players, what are the likely scenarios and what will be the human cost? All questions answered.

"The JavaScript world could use a bit of classification," reads this year's announcement at StateofJS.com: In 2017 this survey helped us do just that, by collecting data from over 20,000 developers to identify current and upcoming trends. This year, we're asking for your help once more to find out which libraries developers want to learn next, which have the best satisfaction ratings, and much more. The survey launched in 2016 "mostly to scratch my own itch," its founder explained in a Medium essay. "I wanted to know what libraries were worth learning, and which ones were on the way out." Last year's survey discovered that React was the dominant framework, though the second most-popular framework was "none," with 9,493 JavaScript developers saying they didn't use one. Vue had increased in popularity while Angular lost steam, and developers collectively rating their overall happiness with front-end tools at 3.8 (on a scale up to five). And more than 28% of the survey's respondent's said they'd used TypeScript, Microsoft's typed superset of JavaScript, and that they'd use it again.

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Canadian dairy farmers fear their industry will be in danger if the government gives in to US demands.