Hi All,

On behalf of the NumPy team I am pleased to announce that NumPy 1.16.6 has been released. This release fixes bugs reported against the 1.16.5 release and backports several enhancements from master that seem appropriate for an LTS series. The supported Python versions are 2.7, 3.5-3.7. This is the last release planned that supports Python 2.7. Wheels for this release can be downloaded from PyPI https://pypi.org/project/numpy/1.16.6, source archives and release notes are available from Github https://github.com/numpy/numpy/releases/tag/v1.16.6. Downstream developers building this release should use Cython >= 0.29.2 and, if using OpenBLAS, OpenBLAS >= v0.3.7.

*Highlights*

- The ``np.testing.utils`` functions have been updated from 1.19.0-dev0. This improves the function documentation and error messages as well extending the ``assert_array_compare`` function to additional types.

*Contributors*

A total of 10 people contributed to this release.

- CakeWithSteak - Charles Harris - Chris Burr - Eric Wieser - Fernando Saravia - Lars Grueter - Matti Picus - Maxwell Aladago - Qiming Sun - Warren Weckesser

*Pull requests merged*

A total of 14 pull requests were merged for this release.

- `#14211 https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/14211`__: BUG: Fix uint-overflow if padding with linear_ramp and negative... - `#14275 https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/14275`__: BUG: fixing to allow unpickling of PY3 pickles from PY2 - `#14340 https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/14340`__: BUG: Fix misuse of .names and .fields in various places (backport... - `#14423 https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/14423`__: BUG: test, fix regression in converting to ctypes. - `#14434 https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/14434`__: BUG: Fixed maximum relative error reporting in assert_allclose - `#14509 https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/14509`__: BUG: Fix regression in boolean matmul. - `#14686 https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/14686`__: BUG: properly define PyArray_DescrCheck - `#14853 https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/14853`__: BLD: add 'apt update' to shippable - `#14854 https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/14854`__: BUG: Fix _ctypes class circular reference. (#13808) - `#14856 https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/14856`__: BUG: Fix `np.einsum` errors on Power9 Linux and z/Linux - `#14863 https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/14863`__: BLD: Prevent -flto from optimising long double representation... - `#14864 https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/14864`__: BUG: lib: Fix histogram problem with signed integer arrays. - `#15172 https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/15172`__: ENH: Backport improvements to testing functions. - `#15191 https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/15191`__: REL: Prepare for 1.16.6 release.

Cheers,

Charles Harris