Starring: Sean Penn, Frances McDormand

New archaeological evidence suggests that America was first discovered by Stone Age people from Europe – 10,000 years before the Siberian-originating ancestors of the American Indians set foot in the New World.

Set apart from the big mainland resorts, this low-key luxury retreat on Isla Boca Brava offers sanctuary, says Sarah Gilbert

This is supposed to be the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. What would Keats make of this autumn, sweltering in the unremitting sunshine, reading newspaper headlines that proclaim Britain is hotter than Barbados, or Hawaii, or Mars? He, like most of us, might not be a climatologist, but I think he'd recognise there's something weird going on.

Kelly Reichardt places her rag-tag pioneers in a claustrophic square box that stifles widescreen pretensions and mirrors the bonneted point of view of heroine Emily (Michelle Williams).

Joe Morris, who died on 17 July aged 85, was one of more than 400 American Indians who used the language of their ancestors to relay secret battlefield orders during the Second World War. Navajo code talkers were young Navajo men who used their language to transmit secret communications in every major engagement in the Pacific theatre, including Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima. Morris kept secret what he did during his Marine Corps service until President Reagan declassified the role of the code talkers in 1982. Morris then began giving presentations to schools and colleges.

In the years since Arundhati Roy won the 1997 Booker Prize for her debut novel, The God of Small Things, she has become the anti-globalisation mascot in India and abroad with her strident opposition of the Indian state, free market economics, the war on terror, and much else. Her prose is vivid and sometimes poetic: witty wordplay interspersed with biting satire that riles India's middle class, the wealthy, and the elite.

The gay and bisexual community of America pre-dates Columbus – and continues to shape the nation. Why isn't it acknowledged? Johann Hari argues that it's time for the activists to come in from the margins

A Federal judge has approved a $3.4 billion (£2.1 billion) payout to American Indians in a case that represents the largest legal settlement ever agreed by the US government.

In one of the largest settlements in the Roman Catholic church's sweeping sex abuse scandal, an order of priests agreed yesterday to pay $166.1 million (£103m) to hundreds of Native Americans and Alaska Natives who were abused at the order's schools around the northwestern US.

*1. Finch had died on 14 January 1977, before the Oscar ceremony took place. The award was accepted on his behalf by Network writer, Paddy Chayevsky. Finch was the first actor to win a posthumous Oscar (a feat later emulated by Best Supporting Actor, Heath Ledger in 2009).

Did anyone ever literally believe that God speaks English? One suspects not. But there are those who think the Goddess of Liberty does so, even if it was the French who first erected statues for her. There is a smallish but noisy transatlantic group of writers, politicians and think-tankers dedicated to the conviction that the values of freedom and democracy have their birthplaces and natural homes peculiarly – maybe even only – in what some of them call the Anglosphere. That term was popularised in 2004 by James Bennett, with his book The Anglosphere Challenge. It has been taken up by conservative historians like Niall Ferguson and, more stridently, Andrew Roberts, and by groups like the Social Affairs Unit. For a time, especially in the years of the Blair-Bush axis, it seemed to have some friends in very high places.

Greenpeace's latest Rainbow Warrior differs dramatically from her two previous incarnations. The first boat (sunk by the French secret services) was a modified trawler. The second was a re-fitted schooner. But Rainbow Warrior III , which will take to the seas later this year, is a £20m custom-built mega-yacht, complete with helicopter pad, secure communications room and the latest electronic navigation equipment.