As many may already know the gimp-user and gimp-devel mailing lists, got nuked sometime last week when the Experimental Computing Facility at UC Berkeley upgraded the box that the lists were run off of. I currently don't know when the lists will be reactivated, moved, or otherwise.
So in the interim period I have gone through the CVS changelog for some of the new stuff.
Quick news about new features gleaned from the CVS ChangeLog.
Adrian Linkins and Tor Lillqvist have been working on GimpBrushHose. The idea behind GimpBrushHose is to have a stream of pixmaps to emit out of the brush (you know like a garden hose.)
Iscissors have been rewritten and added to the CVS.
Sven Neumann added the measure tool. You can measure distances and angles with it.