Free Republic

Estee Lauder and IBM have become the latest Western brands to abandon Russia - but major international companies such as Reckitt, Unilever and British American Tobacco are staying put. Both New York-listed firms said they would suspend all their operations in the country. Estee Lauder, which earns 2.7% of its revenues there, will shut all its stores. They join a wave of blue chip companies that have left in protest at Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine - but others have risked a consumer backlash by choosing not to follow them. UK consumer goods titans Unilever and Reckitt have both condemned...

The AP review of Clinton's calendar — her after-the-fact, official chronology of the events of her four-year term — identified at least 75 meetings with longtime political donors and loyalists, Clinton Foundation contributors and corporate and other outside interests that were either not recorded or listed with identifying details scrubbed. The AP found the omissions by comparing the 1,500-page document with separate planning schedules supplied to Clinton by aides in advance of each day's events. The names of at least 114 outsiders who met with Clinton were missing from her calendar, the records show...

Berlin-Tempelhof, Hitler’s favourite airport, could yet be rescued by one of the world’s most influential Jewish philanthropists. Cosmetics billionaire, New York socialite and art collector Ronald Lauder – son of the celebrated Estée Lauder - is behind a €350m (£235m) project to turn the Third Reich architectural relic into a luxury fly-in health clinic for Europe’s super rich. Berlin's cash-strapped city fathers earlier this year finally cleared the way to develop the proposed new Berlin Brandenburg International (BBI) on the site of the present Schönefeld airport to the south east of the city, handling an annual 22 million passengers. Inner...

SNIP.... MINOR EDITINGMAC Cosmetics has censored Sandra Bernhard for bashing the GOP. The cosmetics giant, owned by Estée Lauder, got hundreds of complaints after it posted an online ad this week for its Plushglass lip gloss in which the balloon-lipped comic does some free-form ranting, including a riff about an "intimidated, frightened, right-wing Republican thin-lipped bitch." But Mac oddly didn't cut a line in which Bernhard cheekily discusses the bodily fluids of a horny barnyard bird.

A San Diego woman has filed a lawsuit against Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom and Estee Lauder for selling anti-aging creams that allegedly employ false advertising. Debra Scheufler says she wants to make advertisers tell the truth about "age-defying" creams that don't live up to their claims. She filed a class action lawsuit in California. "These products that tout themselves as anti-aging products really target women of my era and kind of suck us into the belief that the clock can actually be turned back, when in fact, it cannot be turned back," Scheufler said. "I wasn't getting any younger."

NEWYORK (AP) -- Estee Lauder, who started a kitchen business blending face creams and built it into an international cosmetics empire, has died. She was believed to be 95. Lauder died of cardiopulmonary arrest late Saturday at her home in Manhattan, said Sally Susman, a company spokeswoman.

<p>Saddam: French media mogul MEDIA monolith Hachette Filipacchi, already fearing an anti-French backlash, has a bigger problem: Saddam Hussein owns a $90 million stake in its parent company. Saddam owns just under 2 percent of Lagardere SCA, the French company of which Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., publishers of Elle, Car & Driver, Women's Day and other titles, is a unit. His shares are held by Iraqi-controlled Montana Management, based in Geneva. Saddam's Hachette holdings first came to light when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, and the UN Security Council along with the French and U.S. governments acted to freeze Iraq's assets. At the time he was the second-largest shareholder in Hachette SA, controlling 8.4 percent of the company. Fearing a backlash, Hachette brass voiced their intention to buy the Iraqi strongman out, which most people assumed had been done long ago. In fact, Saddam still has his stake and it's currently worth $90 million, a Hachette rep confirmed to PAGE SIX's Jared Paul Stern. "Under international sanctions, blocked assets are being held until future direction from the UN and applicable governments," the rep said. "Those assets are frozen." Since Saddam has no representation on Hachette's board of directors, he has no influence over the company, and Hachette's spokeswoman assured us the firm is unafraid of a backlash. Some American Elle advertisers we contacted yesterday had no idea Saddam ever owned a slice of Hachette. "We don't know anything about it," said a rep for MAC cosmetics. Donna Karan's people had no comment. Reps for Coach, Estee Lauder and Banana Republic were similarly in the dark. In 1990, when the Saddam-Hachette news broke on "60 Minutes," publishers of Hachette magazines placed emergency calls to top advertisers in a bid to keep them from leaving. They also established a "circulation crisis group" to deal with subscribers who wanted to cancel over the news. Hachette has been testing consumer reaction to the fact that it is a French company, to determine whether "guilt by association" will harm it, Hachette U.S. CEO Jack Kliger told Media Industry Newsletter. Americans "feel comfortable buying [Elle] just as they do with say, Evian and L'Oreal, and dining in French restaurants. Remember too, there are Americans who oppose war with Iraq."</p>