Atlas Obscura: How Racism Was First Officially Codified in 15th-Century Spain

You probably know about the widespread mistreatment of Jews in Spain, even if your first thought when someone says “Spanish Inquisition” is a Monty Python sketch. But Spanish and Portuguese antisemitism isn’t just a historical artifact. According to historians like David Brion Davis, the Spanish categorization and treatment of Jews “provided the final seedbed for Christian Negrophobic racism,” and “gave rise to a more general concern over ‘purity of blood’—limpieza de sangre in Spanish—and thus to an early conception of biological race.”

The discrimination against Spanish Jews peaked decades earlier, in 1391, when a fanatical priest incited anti-Jewish mobs with the slogan “convert or die.” A third to a half of the Spanish Jews—the largest community in Europe at the time—were converted to Christianity, the greatest mass conversion in modern Jewish history. [...]

The most important of these conflicts took place in Toledo, and began as a tax revolt. On January 25, 1449, Alvaro de Luna, a favorite of King Juan II, demanded from Toledo a loan of one million maravedis. The townspeople actively resisted payment, and a mob quickly obtained control of the city gates.  [...]

On June 5, 1449, Sarmiento issued the Sentencia-Estatuto, the first set of racial exclusion laws in modern history. It barred conversos, regardless of whether they were sincere Christians, from holding private or public office or receiving land from the church benefices unless they could prove four generations of Christian affiliation.  [...]

The crime of which those of Jewish lineage were guilty was deicide. The alleged Jewish role in killing Christ was a kind of original sin, inherited by Jews and passed down in the blood. Because the act superseded the rite of baptism, baptism could not purge conversos of this crime. [...]

Along with slavery, Spain exported limpieza. In 1552, the Spanish Crown decreed that emigrants to America must furnish proof of limpieza. The Spanish deployed limpieza throughout Spanish America and the Portuguese adopted it in Brazil. In its new environment, limpieza began to mutate, beginning to refer to an absence of black blood as well as an absence of Jewish blood.

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Politico: Ireland’s love affair with Apple triggers hate at home

The European Commission slapped Apple with a €13 billion penalty for allegedly accepting a sweetheart tax deal from Ireland earlier this year. Cork residents resent Dublin’s unwavering defense of the tech giant, most recently its support of the company’s appeal Monday that claimed the EU Commission overstepped its powers. Instead of banking an amount roughly the size of the country’s annual health budget, Irish leaders recoiled at the order and defended its four-decade-long relationship with Apple. [...]

Apple has been a lifeline for many in a city where the suicide rate is twice the national average and the economy continues to be weak, though the recovery appears to be happening faster than the rest of the country in part because of the tech industry. Apple’s workforce in the city swelled from a few hundred employees in the early 1980s to more than 4,000 today. There’ll be more work in 2018 when a new facility opens in the center of a scrappy housing estate. It’s one of three Apple locations in the city but the only one with wild horses grazing nearby.

Though Apple employs more than 4,000 people in a city of 125,000, many locals are appalled that the company hasn’t contributed more to the local economy through taxes. Apple paid an effective corporate tax rate of 1 percent on its European profits in 2003. That slid to 0.005 percent in 2014, vastly lower than Ireland’s corporate tax rate of 12.5 percent, according to the European Commission. [...]

The government in Dublin is an awkward position. A €13 billion windfall would buffer some of the effects of Brexit but squash overseas investment from Apple and other multinationals. Without foreign cash, jobs will disappear.

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Politico: The EU’s Morocco problem

On Wednesday, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) delivered a vindication for the people of Western Sahara. In a long-awaited ruling on a trade deal between the European Union and Morocco, the court reiterated long-established international law that Western Sahara is not part of Morocco, and therefore that trade agreements that include Western Sahara cannot be signed with Morocco.

The EU must now convey a clear message to Morocco that, in keeping with this judgment, it will immediately halt all agreements, funding and projects used by the Moroccan government to reinforce its illegal occupation of Western Sahara. The EU and its member countries must also ensure that all private companies and entities under their jurisdiction also cease their engagement with Morocco, in respect of any exploitation of the natural resources of Western Sahara. [...]

Furthermore, as the ECJ ruling makes clear, the EU would be in violation of international and regional human rights law if it fails to comply. Morocco reports details of its development projects to the European Commission, which must approve them individually if they are to receive EU funding. With the ECJ’s judgment, there is no ambiguity about the situation: Western Sahara is not part of Morocco, and EU funding for Moroccan developments in the territory only entrenches a brutal and illegal occupation. A plea of ignorance will no longer suffice for those who illegally exploit the resources of the people of Western Sahara. [...]

The challenge for the EU is how to help end Morocco’s illegal occupation of Western Sahara — an occupation characterized by brutal, systematic and well-documented human rights abuses, including mass detentions and routine threats by security services to rape the wives and sisters of Sahrawi activists.

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CityLab: Stockholm's Ingenious Plan to Recycle Yard Waste

Instead of tossing trees into the shredder, the city is launching a program this month to collect them and turn them into an environmental workhorse known as biochar. This charcoal product can be mixed into soil to greatly improve its drainage and nutrient levels, spurring vibrant growth for more plants. Meanwhile, the heat created by the charcoal-making process will be siphoned off and fed into the city’s district heating system.

So far, so great. But while the idea of Christmas trees re-entering the soil and helping new trees to flourish is delightful, it’s only the tip of the iceberg here.

That’s because Christmas trees are just among the first sources of green waste to be used in what could be one of the most ambitious, potentially influential projects coined by a European city thus far. By bringing together the parks department, the city’s waste disposal service, energy providers, and urban gardeners, Stockholm’s biochar project will create a virtuous cycle so ingenious—and ultimately so simple—that it could provide a template for cities across the world. [...]

Embrén and his colleagues started helping city trees with a new type of soil covering that proved effective in stimulating growth: crushed bedrock on top of sand, clay, and peat. By making the ground more porous, this substance also helped the ground absorb more stormwater, creating an urban soil management process that has already gained some renown as the so-called Stockholm Solution.

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The Intercept: Obama Allows Toothless UN Resolution Against Israeli Settlements to Pass

THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION on Friday finally allowed the UN Security Council to call on Israel to halt its settlement expansion on Friday. The resolution essentially re-states U.S. policy that settlement activity in the West Bank is illegal and counterproductive, and that Israel’s security must be protected.

The U.S. did not support the resolution, but it did not utilize its veto power either. [...]

The resolution is toothless — it does not, for example, authorize any form of sanctions to compel Israel to respect international law. Yet prior to its passage, a long list of both Democrats and Republicans called on the administration to veto it, including President-elect Donald Trump, New York’s Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, and Wisconsin-based House Speaker Paul Ryan: [...]

The pressure to veto a toothless resolution shows how constricted U.S. policy on Israel-Palestine has become in recent years, even though the American public appears to favor tougher UN action on the issue. A recent Brookings poll finds that nearly two-thirds of Americans favor UN resolutions demanding a halt to settlements and that a majority of self-identified Democrats support some form of sanctions towards Israel to bring about peace.

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