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News Nearby: Eye Kandy Boutique Brings Fashion Finds to Harmony.

When Kandy Barkley was scoping out the Center of Harmony as a potential location for her clothing boutique, it wasn’t just the space that caught her eye—it was the refrigerator.
“When I came in here, I fell in love with it,” she said.
To be fair, this isn’t just any old refrigerator Barkley is talking about. It’s an antique, floor-to-ceiling decorative cooler that once was used by a butcher in the former Otto & Gert’s building in the heart of historic Harmony.
“It actually functions, too,” Barkley said.
Today, the unique piece occupies a prime space in Barkley’s new clothing boutique, Eye Kandy.
Located inside The Center of Harmony—which also houses several other businesses and an event space—Eye Kandy opened Aug. 1. The boutique features women’s clothing at a variety of price points, handbags, belts and other accessories.
“It’s more one-of-a-kind stuff,” Barkley said of the boutique’s style.
A Seneca Valley alumni who grew up and lives in Harmony, Barkley said she carefully chose each piece in the store to reflect comfort, style and a flattering fit—for all body types.
“The main thing when I look at clothes is how it will look on a women’s body,” she said.
Prior to opening Eye Kandy, Barkley was vice-president of finance at her family’s business, Knichel Logistics in Gibsonia. After taking a break from the business to deal with a health issue, Barkley said she found herself wanting to do something different.
Enter Angela Dawson.
The owner of A. Dawson Apparel Group, which specializes in women’s wholesale clothing and accessories, Dawson, of Jackson Township, is a clothing representative for about a dozen brands.
Barkley, who is friends with Dawson, said she began selling Dawson’s sample items from her own home in trunk shows. It wasn’t long before she decided to open her own boutique.
“I thought wow, this is great,” Barkley said of being inspired to open her own shop. “Everyone loved everything so much.”

Saint Petersburg has long been seen as Russia’s most liberal city. But now it may be leading a national movement to ban public displays of gay life across Russia.
When gay rights activists recently released a rainbow of balloons from a Saint Petersburg park, the predictable happened. City police herded activists into a waiting bus. Then, black-shirted nationalists attacked the bus.
In March, Saint Petersburg, Europe’s fourth largest city, banned any public display of “gay propaganda.” Now, Russian legislators are debating adopting a nationwide ban. The goal is to keep gay life behind closed doors, out of the sight of children.
A gay pride march last month in Berlin shows Russia is a target of the international gay rights movement. As 700,000 Berliners watched or paraded, a cannon shot a rainbow of colored confetti at Russia’s embassy.
But 1,300 kilometers to the east, here in Saint Petersburg, no one is laughing.
Artem makes a specialty of tracking down gay rallies and breaking them up.
To him, gay parades and posters, gay-themed talk shows and art shows all add up to undermining traditional Russian society with the gay lifestyle.
He says that Russia will never permit open displays of what he calls “filth.”
Once Artem is out of sight, Olga and Irina step from behind the bushes to talk. Olga says that she and her partner of seven years are not recruiting converts. They are simply looking for tolerance, equal rights and the ability to get married.
With no tolerance for gays on the horizon in Russia, Olga and Irina plan to move next year across the Gulf of Finland, to Helsinki. There, this couple of seven years can register their partnership and legally adopt a child.
Downtown, Olga Lenkova works with Vykhod, or Coming Out, a gay rights group. She says the new law is changing life for gays in Saint Petersburg, long seen as Russia’s most liberal major city:
“Part of the community just goes back into the closest and tries to hide even more than they did before. And, part of the community becomes more active than they ever were, or becomes active for the first time,” Lenkova said.
For now, the gay movement’s biggest allies are from outside Russia.
Early this month, Lenkova was one of several Saint Petersburg activists who met with visiting U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Next it will be Madonna, who gives a concert here on August 9. In advance, the American pop star has denounced Saint Petersburg’s “gay gag law” as “a ridiculous atrocity.”
But with polls showing big majorities of Russians backing bans on public displays of gay life, Russian police may be breaking up gay rallies for a long time to come.

Good Dirt Gone Dry Wilting Corn Crop as Food Costs Rally.
Tom Flora walked into one of his corn fields in Delphi, Indiana, last week to survey land that until last month he expected would yield a bigger-than-average harvest. Eight rows in, he declared the crop a total loss.

“I’ve never seen this,” 63-year-old Flora said as he fingered the wilted brown leaves on a four-foot corn stalk that was half the normal height for this time of year and had cobs almost devoid of kernels. “This is good dirt here, but not this year. It’s too dry. I doubt this will produce anything.” The worst Midwest drought since 1988 is baking farms from Arkansas to Ohio and threatening corn output that the U.S. said last week will be the second-largest ever. The price of the grain used in food for people and livestock is surging at a time when retail-meat costs already are near record highs. Global food prices are poised to rebound from a 21-month low in June because of weaker-than-expected supply in the U.S., the world’s largest corn exporter, the United Nations said July 5.

With forecasters including AccuWeather Inc. predicting worsening conditions in the next month, corn traded in Chicago surged by $2.665 a bushel since mid-June, or 53 percent. The rally is adding to pressure on the livestock industry because cattle feedlots are already losing as much as $200 an animal. Sanderson Farms Inc. (SAFM), the third-largest U.S. poultry producer, said every 10-cent corn increase boosts costs by $2.21 million.

Corn advanced 22 percent this month to $7.7225 on the Chicago Board of Trade, the most among 24 commodities in the Standard & Poor’s GSCI Spot Index, which rose 5.2 percent. The MSCI All-Country World Index of equities fell 0.9 percent and the U.S. Dollar Index gained 1.8 percent. Treasuries returned 0.9 percent, a Bank of America Corp. index shows.