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Having or showing a dislike of or prejudice against people from other countries.

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BERLIN (Reuters) - Xenophobia is rising in the ex-communist east of Germany and risks tarnishing its reputation as a place to do business, the government said on Wednesday as it published its annual report on the state of German unification.

Far-right violence and attacks on migrants rose dramatically last year, with riots and arson attacks on refugee shelters in the towns of Heidenau and Freital in Saxony state. More than one million, mainly Muslim migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Asia streamed into Germany over the course of 2015.

"Right-wing extremism in all its forms poses a very serious threat for the social and economic development of the new states," Iris Gleicke, the federal government's commissioner for eastern German affairs, said, referring to the five states that comprised Communist East Germany from 1945 to 1990.

Germany recorded 1,408 violent acts carried out by rightist supporters last year, a rise of more than 42 percent from 2014, and 75 arson attacks on refugee shelters, up from five a year earlier, according to an annual report by the BfV domestic intelligence agency published in June.

Attacks were more frequent in east German states. There were 58.7 cases of far right-motivated violence per 1 million inhabitants in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern last year, compared to the average of 10.5 cases in west German states, the report said.

Gleicke said the vast majority of east Germans were not xenophobic. But she urged civil society groups and businesses to speak out more loudly against far-right extremism.

"Society should not look away when people are attacked or refugee shelters are set on fire. A lot is on the line for east Germany," said Gleicke, who is from the east.

Heidenau in Saxony became infamous when anti-refugee riots broke out and Chancellor Angela Merkel - who grew up in East Germany - was heckled by far-right activists as an alleged traitor for her open-door policy towards refugees.

Germany's acceptance of more than one million refugees last year boosted popular support for the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which is now represented in all of the eastern federal states.

On trips abroad to Japan and California to try and drum up investment into east Germany, Gleicke said her interlocutors had cited concern about whether their foreign staff would be welcome and whether their investments would be safe.

"It's quite clear that a location that doesn't show itself to be liberal-minded will face economic disadvantages," she told a news conference.

More than 25 years after reunification, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in east German states still lags that of west German states by more than 25 percent, hindered by a population decline and a lack of major employers.

Not a single company in Germany's blue-chip DAX index is headquartered in the east.

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German Government Fears Xenophobia Will Do Economic Harm

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BERLIN (Reuters) - Xenophobia is rising in the ex-communist east of Germany and risks tarnishing its reputation as a place to do business, the government said on Wednesday as it published its annual report on the state of German unification.

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A general vote by the electorate on a single political question that has been referred to them for a direct decision. (voters get to choose yes or no to a question like spending money on a new school)

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Breaking News, Business News, Financial and Investing News & More | Reuters.co.uk

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Reuters.co.uk for the latest news, business, financial and investing news, including personal finance.

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the improvement or fixing of what is wrong, corrupt, unsatisfactory, etc.

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A procedure that allows citizens to remove and replace a public official before the end of a term of office

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Blue Bell ice cream is back in hot water.

The Brenham, Texas-based company is once again worried about potential listeria contamination. Blue Bell said Wednesday that it is recalling packages of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream.

The company said a batch of edible cookie dough that Blue Bell gets from a third-party supplier, Aspen Hills, may contain listeria -- a bacteria that can be deadly for the young, sick or elderly.

Both companies say no illnesses have been reported.

Blue Bell said on Twitter Wednesday that it's issuing the recall "out of an abundance of caution."

Last year, Blue Bell had to halt production and issue a massive recall for all its products due to a listeria outbreak that was linked back to its products. The shutdown forced Blue Bell to issue layoffs for the first time in the company's 100-year history.

But the ice cream maker appeared to turn a corner by the end of 2015. Sid Bass, a billionaire businessman, became a company partner. And its factory in Alabama was cleared to resume production.

Based on social media posts, Blue Bell -- which was available in more than 30 states before last year's recall -- has spent 2016 getting its products back in the hands of retailers. It just delivered tubs to Raleigh, North Carolina, for the first time two days before the latest recall was announced.

We're all smiles in Raleigh, NC, because Blue Bell is back! Look for it in stores in Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill and surrounding areas. pic.twitter.com/WuzAGUSpH0
- Blue Bell Ice Cream (@ILoveBlueBell) September 19, 2016

The enhanced food safety screenings the company adopted after the last year's debacle may be what caught the issue.

It was Blue Bell that identified "a potential problem through intensified internal testing" and notified the supplier, Blue Bell said in a statement.

The recall affects some half-gallon and pint-sized chocolate chip cookie dough and half-gallon "Cookie Two Step" products that were distributed to stores in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. A list of specific product codes can be found here.

Blue Bell is asking customers in possession of a recalled product to return it to its place of purchase. Questions can be directed to 979-836-7977, which is operated Monday through Friday from 8 am to 5 pm CST.

CNNMoney (New York) First published September 21, 2016: 6:24 PM ET

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Blue Bell recalls cookie dough ice cream over listeria concerns

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The Brenham, Texas-based company is once again worried about potential listeria contamination. Blue Bell said Wednesday that it is recalling packages of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. The company said a batch of edible cookie dough that Blue Bell gets from a third-party supplier, Aspen Hills, may contain listeria -- a bacteria that can be deadly for the young, sick or elderly.

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To search for and expose real or alleged corruption, scandal, or the like, especially in politics.

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Muckraker, any of a group of American writers identified with pre- World War I reform and exposé literature. The muckrakers provided detailed, accurate journalistic accounts of the political and economic corruption and social hardships caused by the power of big business in a rapidly industrializing United States. The name muckraker was pejorative when used by U.S. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt in his speech of April 14, 1906; he borrowed a passage from John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress that referred to "the Man with the Muckrake...who could look no way but downward." But muckraker also came to take on favourable connotations of social concern and courageous exposition.

Where does the term muckraker come from?

What does the term muckraker mean?

Who was the first muckraker?

The muckrakers' work grew out of the yellow journalism of the 1890s, which whetted the public appetite for news arrestingly presented, and out of popular magazines, especially those established by S.S. McClure, Frank A. Munsey, and Peter F. Collier. The emergence of muckraking was heralded in the January 1903 issue of McClure's Magazine by articles on municipal government, labour, and trusts, written by Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, and Ida M. Tarbell.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The intense public interest aroused by articles critical of political corruption, industrial monopolies, and fraudulent business practices rallied journalists, novelists, and reformers of all sorts to sharpen their criticism of American society. Charles Edward Russell led the reform writers with exposés ranging from The Greatest Trust in the World (1905) to The Uprising of the Many (1907), the latter of which reported on methods being tried to extend democracy in other countries. Lincoln Steffens wrote about corrupt city and state politics in The Shame of the Cities (1904). Brand Whitlock, who wrote The Turn of the Balance (1907), a novel opposing capital punishment, was also a reform mayor of Toledo, Ohio. Thomas W. Lawson, a Boston financier, provided in "Frenzied Finance" ( Everybody's, 1904-05) a major exposé of stock-market abuses and insurance fraud. Tarbell's The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904) exposed the corrupt practices used to form a great industrial monopoly. Edwin Markham's Children in Bondage was a major attack on child labour. Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle (1906) and Samuel Hopkins Adams's The Great American Fraud (1906), combined with the work of Harvey W. Wiley and U.S. Sen. Albert J. Beveridge, brought about passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. David Graham Phillips's series "The Treason of the Senate" (Cosmopolitan, 1906), which inspired Pres. Roosevelt's speech in 1906, was influential in leading to the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution, which provided for popular senatorial elections. Muckraking as a movement largely disappeared between 1910 and 1912.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica This article was most recently revised and updated by Brian Duignan, Senior Editor.

Learn More in these related Britannica articles:

key people

related topics

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muckraker | Definition, History, Examples, & Facts

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Muckraker, any of a group of American writers identified with pre-World War I reform and expose literature. The muckrakers provided detailed, accurate journalistic accounts of the political and economic corruption and social hardships caused by the power of big business in a rapidly industrializing United States.

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An organized association of workers formed to protect and further their rights and interests; a labor union.

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2016's edition of Labor Day followed a well-established tradition - unions claiming credit for every worker gain. Among their most common assertions, often incorporated in attributing negative wage trends to eroding union power, was that unions raise all workers' wages. Unfortunately, unions retard rather than raise others' real earning power.

Unions leverage special government-granted powers (e.g., unique exemptions from antitrust laws) allowing current employees to prevent competition from others willing to do the same work for less. This is a form of collusion that, done by any business, would be legally prosecuted.

The higher union wages that result are then credited for raising all workers' wages because they supposedly force up other employers' wages to keep their workers from leaving for those better-paying alternatives. However, their claim cannot be true without violating the law of demand.

Higher Wages, Fewer Jobs

Higher wages from unions' government-imposed monopoly power would push up others' wages only if it increased the number of such high paying jobs. The reason is that employers need only outbid employees' actual options to retain them. But by artificially forcing up the cost of hiring their workers, unions reduce rather than increase the number of such jobs offered by employers, reflecting the reduced output consumers will buy at the higher costs and prices that result. Instead of improving the alternatives available to non-union workers, they are worsened, as the displaced workers are forced into competition with others for non-union jobs.

Those displaced workers increase the labor supply for non-union employment. That pushes wages for all workers in those jobs down, not up. Consequently, union wage premiums do not benefit all workers; benefits come primarily from other workers' pockets.

With only about 7% of America's private sector workforce remaining unionized, union power therefore cuts the real incomes of 13 out of 14 workers. And since unions also hike government service costs directly, as well as through other cost-increasing policies (e.g., the Davis-Bacon Act and Project Labor Agreements) which big labor's political clout has pushed through, all other workers are also harmed as taxpayers.

Union Opposition to International Trade

Unions have also used the same "big lie" technique of constantly repeating the opposite of the truth as fact in other areas. For example, aware that their monopoly power to exclude competing workers stops at the border, unions have long been the core backers of protectionism. They focus their attention on those getting special protection, then assert that their benefits will also spread throughout the economy to benefit others. But they ignore protectionism's much larger harms - to all other workers who would have gained from expanded exports; to all other workers who, as consumers, have their access to lower cost and superior imports (and domestic production forced to compete with it) restricted; and to all other workers adversely affected by the reduction in real wealth and income produced by domestic protectionism and induced foreign protectionist responses.

Given that Labor Day has been considered the traditional start of "serious" presidential campaigning, it is an appropriate time to remember just how damaging unions' "big lie" strategy is. Its illogical twist can derail accurate understanding of the harm unions impose on almost all Americans, offering a sobering reminder that "It ain't ignorance that does the most damage; its knowing so derned much that ain't so." After all, when people know they are ignorant of important variables that bear on their decisions, they usually don't bet the house on them, but when they think they know what is false to be true, they often lose the house. And a lot of American houses are on the line this November.

Gary M. Galles is a professor of economics at Pepperdine University. He is the author of The Apostle of Peace: The Radical Mind of Leonard Read.

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No, Unions Don't Increase Everyone's Wages | Gary Galles

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2016's edition of Labor Day followed a well-established tradition - unions claiming credit for every worker gain. Among their most common assertions, often incorporated in attributing negative wage trends to eroding union power, was that unions raise all workers' wages.

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A political organization in which an authoritative boss or small group, commands the support of a group of supporters and businesses (usually campaign workers), who receive rewards for their efforts. The machine's power is based on the ability of the workers to get out the vote for their candidates on election day. In many cases illegal actions are taken to control the government for the benefit of that group.

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political machine, in U.S. politics, a party organization, headed by a single boss or small autocratic group, that commands enough votes to maintain political and administrative control of a city, county, or state.

The rapid growth of American cities in the 19th century, a result of both immigration and migration from rural areas, created huge problems for city governments, which were often poorly structured and unable to provide services. In those conditions, political machines-such as Tammany Hall, run by boss William Magear Tweed (1823-73) in New York City -were able to build a loyal voter following, especially among immigrant groups, by performing such favours as providing jobs or housing.

Political machines are characterized by a disciplined and hierarchical organization, reaching down to neighbourhood and block organizers, that enables the machine to respond to the problems of individual neighbourhoods, or even families, in exchange for loyalty at the polls. The term refers to their ability to elect candidates or enact measures with mechanical efficiency and predictability.

Although the primary goal of a political machine is keeping itself in power rather than providing good government, machines have been responsible for restructuring city governments to centralize authority, improving facilities and services, helping to assimilate immigrant groups, and encouraging the growth of business and industry. Supporters of political machines say that they "work" and that consolidating power in the hands of a boss, like Mayor Richard J. Daley (1902-76) of Chicago, guarantees city governments the power and authority that they need to cope with urban problems effectively. However, because political machines in such cities as Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Kansas City have also been responsible for many abuses of power, the term carries a pejorative sense.

Organizers who "deliver" the votes are often rewarded with patronage jobs. However, patronage can result in poorer service to the citizens because appointees may be neither qualified for their jobs nor interested in performing them. Control of both elective and appointed posts also gives a machine control of government salaries and revenues, which can be used to enrich the party at the public's expense. For example, the machine may accept donations or kickbacks from businesses in return for such favours as tax or zoning concessions or the award of lucrative public-works contracts. In some cities, machine business dealings have included accepting money from organized-crime syndicates in exchange for protection from legal interference.

In cities whose neighbourhoods are divided along ethnic or racial lines, machine patronage may aggravate hostilities by awarding most jobs and services to those people of the same background as the city's power elite. In practice, this made machine politics the last defense of white neighbourhoods against growing black populations, while black politicians who anticipated power viewed their constituents as merely the latest in a series of ethnic or racial groups that had benefited from the machine.

Since the 19th-century heyday of machine politics, civil service reforms limiting the number of patronage jobs, the institution of direct primaries rather than party nomination of candidates, the municipal operation of public utilities, and judicial review by state and federal courts have all reduced the power of political machines. The steady exodus of city residents to the suburbs since World War II and a more mobile population with fewer ties to particular neighbourhoods have also weakened the social base that once made political machines synonymous with city government.

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Political machine | Definition, History, & Facts

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political machine, in U.S. politics, a party organization, headed by a single boss or small autocratic group, that commands enough votes to maintain political and administrative control of a city, county, or state.

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Conditions relating to public health, especially the provision of clean drinking water, adequate sewage disposal and garbage disposal.

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News, Opinions and Resources for Sanitation for All

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A run-down and often overcrowded apartment house, especially in a poor section of a large city.

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Tenements - Facts & Summary - HISTORY.com

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Find out more about the history of Tenements, including videos, interesting articles, pictures, historical features and more. Get all the facts on HISTORY.com

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Becoming more like a city. When populations of people grow, the population of a place may spill over from city to nearby areas. Maybe tall apartment buildings spring up on what had been the outskirts of town, bringing more people there to live and work.

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urban; urbanization; loss of agricultural land; loss of biodiversity; suburban sprawl; city; metropolitan; rural; land use; disaster; human; residents; dwellings; town; mega city; noisy; built-up; schools; roads; road; community; urban search and rescue; communities; station; downtown

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Population studies and urbanization. Read scientific research on the effects of urbanization and related research.

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The right of citizens, outside the legislature (lawmakers), to introduce ideas for legislation (laws).

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The Digital News Initiative (DNI) is a partnership between Google and publishers in Europe to support high-quality journalism through technology and innovation.

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The process by which an economy is transformed from primarily agricultural (farming) to one based on the manufacturing of goods (machines and factorie). Individual manual labor is often replaced by mechanized mass production, and craftsmen are replaced by assembly lines.

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Coming to live permanently in a foreign country.

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Donald Trump: Immigration security is national security

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Republican presidential nominee holds campaign rally in High Point, North Carolina

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Dishonest or fraudulent conduct by those in power, typically involving bribery. (Giving money for favors)

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Brazil's former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will stand trial on corruption and money laundering charges over an alleged scheme at the state oil company, Petrobras, a judge has said.

Prosecutors say he accepted 3.7m reais ($1.11m; £867,000) in bribes connected to the multi-billion dollar scheme.

Lula, 70, had already been charged in August with allegedly obstructing investigations.

He denies any wrongdoing and says the accusations are politically motivated.

"I am sad," Lula said. "It is a big farce, a big lie, a big pyrotechnic show.

"What's happening isn't getting me down, but just motivates me to go out and talk more."

Lula: The most hated and loved man in Brazil

What has gone wrong in Brazil?

Judge Sergio Moro, who is overseeing Operation Car Wash, the investigation into corruption allegations at Petrobras, said there was "sufficient evidence of [Lula's] responsibility".

The money that the ex-president allegedly received was laundered through the purchase and renovation of a beach apartment, prosecutors say.

The flat was built by a construction company implicated in the scandal.

His wife, Marisa Leticia, and six others have also been indicted.

Lula was accused by prosecutors of being the "boss" of the scheme, estimated to have cost the company more than $2bn (£1.5bn).

Several politicians and Petrobras executives have been arrested and sentenced as a result of the two-year inquiry.

Investigators believe overpriced contracts with Petrobras were given in return for bribes.

Some of the illicitly-obtained money was used to finance the electoral campaign of top Brazilian politicians, they allege.

Lula, who served as president between 2003 and 2011, was one of Brazil's most popular leaders and is seen as a possible candidate for the 2018 presidential elections.

However, the popularity of his Workers' Party plummeted this year and his chosen successor Dilma Rousseff was impeached last month.

A criminal conviction would bar him from running in 2018.

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Brazil's Lula to be tried for corruption

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Brazil's former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will stand trial on corruption and money laundering charges over an alleged scheme at the state oil company, Petrobras, a judge has said. Prosecutors say he accepted 3.7m reais ($1.11m; £867,000) in bribes connected to the multi-billion dollar scheme.