National

This month, more than a dozen homeless veterans will finally have a place to call their own, thanks to the American Legion.

The organization's post in a small Connecticut town has been working for a decade on a unique project to create not transitional but permanent supportive housing in their rural community.

For 55-year-old Army veteran Jeff MacDonald, the new facility in Jewett City, Conn., was like "winning the lottery."

As part of the NPR Cities Project, we'll be hearing from listeners about their own cities. Find out how to submit photos and sound at npr.org/nprcities. In this edition, we have the sound of a lonely saxophone under the Michigan Avenue Bridge in Chicago.

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MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

Twelve days and counting, that's how long some people in West Virginia have been without power since a massive storm blitzed the eastern United States. At the height of the outages, more than four million people had no electricity. Most are back online but 35,000 people are still waiting.

Here's Jessica Lilly of West Virginia Public Broadcasting.

JESSICA LILLY, BYLINE: At Ansted Baptist Church in Fayette County, Joann Brewer and her grandkids have come here not for the Gospel but food and ice.

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MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

A small public school district is about to go private. The emergency manager for schools in Muskegon Heights, in western Michigan, is turning the entire system over to a charter school operator.

And as Lindsey Smith of Michigan Radio reports, that's already a model for the state's other financially-troubled districts.

Native Americans and Pilgrims were onto something when they turned to cranberries as an infection fighter. American settlers believed the bitter food could stave off scurvy. But there's more than just Vitamin C in this indigenous berry.

Nearly 31 years after he was convicted of rape and armed robbery, Kirk Odom on Tuesday all but won his fight to be declared an innocent man.

The Justice Department filed court papers saying, "There is clear and convincing evidence that Mr. Odom is innocent of the charges for which he was convicted," and apologized for the "terrible injustice."

Bernard Farrell obsesses over every bite he eats, every minute of exercise he gets, and everything that stresses him out. And, more than anything else, Farrell obsesses over his blood sugar.

He has to. Farrell, 55, has Type 1 diabetes.

"Pretty much everything affects our blood sugar," says Farrell, of Littleton, Mass.

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NEAL CONAN, HOST:

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. Heat in the summertime is usually not news, but this year is more than a little out of the ordinary. The first six months of 2012 is already on the books as the warmest half-year on record according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.