Add some items

Doc/whatsnew/whatsnew26.tex

@@ -37,7 +37,13 @@ Here are all of the changes that Python 2.6 makes to the core Python
 language.
 
 \begin{itemize}
-\item TBD
+
+% Bug 1569356
+\item An obscure change: when you use the the \function{locals()}
+function inside a \keyword{class} statement, the resulting dictionary
+no longer returns free variables.  (Free variables, in this case, are
+variables referred to in the \keyword{class} statement 
+that aren't attributes of the class.)
 
 \end{itemize}
 
@@ -47,7 +53,10 @@ language.
 
 \begin{itemize}
 
-\item Optimizations should be described here.
+% Patch 1624059
+\item Internally, a bit is now set in type objects to indicate some of
+the standard built-in types.  This speeds up checking if an object is
+a subclass of one of these types.  (Contributed by Neal Norwitz.)
 
 \end{itemize}
 
@@ -67,6 +76,43 @@ details.
 
 \begin{itemize}
 
+\item New function in the \module{heapq} module:
+\function{merge(iter1, iter2, ...)} 
+takes any number of iterables that return data 
+\emph{in sorted order}, 
+and 
+returns a new iterator that returns the contents of
+all the iterators, also in sorted order.  For example:
+
+\begin{verbatim}
+heapq.merge([1, 3, 5, 9], [2, 8, 16]) ->
+  [1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 9, 16]
+\end{verbatim}
+
+(Contributed by Raymond Hettinger.)
+
+\item New function in the \module{itertools} module:
+\function{izip_longest(iter1, iter2, ...\optional{, fillvalue})}
+makes tuples from each of the elements; if some of the iterables
+are shorter than others, the missing values 
+are set to \var{fillvalue}.  For example:
+
+\begin{verbatim}
+itertools.izip_longest([1,2,3], [1,2,3,4,5]) ->
+  [(1, 1), (2, 2), (3, 3), (None, 4), (None, 5)]
+\end{verbatim}
+
+(Contributed by Raymond Hettinger.)
+
+% Patch #1490190
+\item New functions in the \module{posix} module: \function{chflags()}
+and \function{lchflags()} are wrappers for the corresponding system
+calls (where they're available).  Constants for the flag values are
+defined in the \module{stat} module; some possible values include
+\constant{UF_IMMUTABLE} to signal the file may not be changed and
+\constant{UF_APPEND} to indicate that data can only be appended to the
+file.  (Contributed by M. Levinson.)
+
 \item The \module{smtplib} module now supports SMTP over 
 SSL thanks to the addition of the \class{SMTP_SSL} class.
 This class supports an interface identical to the existing \class{SMTP}