fixes some problems pyflakes complains about

Change-Id: I1eb16fa595b0b1d97ae14279b8aa25bd2740f511
updated AUTHORS and CHANGELOG

These updates are to reflect the changes that have been
backported into the 1.8.0 release candidate.

Change-Id: I9b2abb9809fa6715a427dc0dbe0474aba140a596
Merge "fixes some problems pyflakes complains about"