Morality

• The vision of the boy in front of the ruins of his family is one of rude survivalism.
• It’s a trait that will see Pip through the misadventures ahead – but the sorrow of surviving on these terms is unmistakable.
• However, Tanika Gupta’s adaptation of Great Expectations, currently showing at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre, opens with “Pipli” buzzing around, doing cartwheels, at ease in his world.
• Dickens brought the upper classes to their knees in his novels, exposing the entanglements of gentility and criminality.

Pip and Magwitch

• In the Dickens novel, Pip refuses to treat his terrifying encounter with Magwitch as anything other than a “chance occurrence”.
• Magwitch – who reinvents himself in the penal colony of Australia, where he is transported to – becomes the anonymous benefactor whose colonial labour finances Pip’s education.
• Dickens’s Pip does not treat his entry into Satis House – the estate of Miss Havisham – as the random event it is.

MacCaulay’s Minute

• In Gupta’s play, the backdrop to Pipli’s soul-searching is the first partition of Bengal into East and West Bengal (1905).
• This echoes politician Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Minute Upon Indian Education (1835), which shaped British educational policy.
• The Macaulay Minute ushered a colonial modernity no longer reliant on the indigenous literature and culture and bred mimic men fully compliant with British rule.

The language issue

• The treatment of language in decolonising Dickens’s Great Expectations is a missed opportunity.
• Furthermore, little attention is paid to differences between Bengali Hindus and Muslims when it came to their respective reckonings of Curzon’s division.
• This is clever, but reinforces once again the power of English to stand in as both global language and local vernacular.

• A little over three years ago, a group of Portuguese youths filed a legal action against 32 European governments to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) over what they say is a failure to adequately tackle global heating.
• Now, the Strasbourg court will be hearing them on 27 September, in a novel, far-fetching bid to arm-twist them into taking climate action.

The claim

• Plaintiffs expressed their grave concern over governments’ insufficient efforts to limit global warming to 2°C above pre-industrial levels.
• Were the rest of the world to mirror their commitments, the global temperature would hike by 2 to 3C, according to Climate Tracker.

Human rights to the rescue of climate justice

• Against a global backdrop of increasing climate litigation, the Duarte Agostinho application follows in the steps of other climate lawsuits to draw a clear link between human rights violations and climate change.
• The first to have blazed that trail was the Urgenda Foundation in 2015, whose legal action compelled the government to cut emissions by 25% from 1990 levels on the grounds of its applicants’ human rights.
• They also claim to suffer from anxiety after wildfires in Portugal in 2017 killed more than 120 people.
• Governments, they argue, have failed to comply with their positive obligations under Articles 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights (Right to life):
  “Everyone’s right to life shall be protected by law.

Ushering in effective action

• To prevent this from happening again, young people will be banking on a range of principles from human rights, including that of effectiveness.
• According to this postulate, states cannot remain passive in the face of a violation of the rights of individuals.
• For the Court, this principle originally offered a guarantee that states would implement the positive obligations of protection required by the Convention.
• The latter orders parties to take action to prevent a provision from being violated, even in a context of uncertainty.

The European Court’s climate challenge

• The ECHR takes on average two years to reach a decision, though this period may vary depending on the complexity of the case.
• The question of the verdict’s impact on the continent’s climate justice also remains to be seen.
• However, it could sharpen States’ obligations in climate matters and respect for human rights.

• And one day each year, scholars tie these character-based elements together with Constitution Day, commemorated annually on Sept. 17.
• Some classrooms will be transported to the 18th Century with reenactments of the signing of the Constitution.
• NHA's Moral Focus virtues are sprinkled throughout Constitution Day lessons.
• "All of these Moral Focus virtues are things that we can tie in when we teach about history," Rickett-Meriweather said.

• The IBD/TIPP Economic Optimism Index , a leading national poll on consumer confidence, today showed some positive momentum.
• The IBD/TIPP Economic Optimism Index has established a strong track record of foreshadowing the confidence indicators issued later each month by the University of Michigan and The Conference Board.
• The poll was conducted online using TechnoMetrica’s network of panels to provide the sample.
• The Presidential Leadership Index was up across the board, with its overall reading climbing 5.7% over last month.