By JEFF MARTIN, ANDREW DeMILLO and SAFIYAH RIDDLE

A bloodhound picked up the scent shortly after the “ Devil in the Ozarks ” escaped from a lockup in northern Arkansas. The hound didn’t have to go far to begin the hunt — it lives at the prison as part of a specialized unit that uses man’s best friend to help track fugitives.

Although the scent of convicted killer Grant Hardin was lost because of heavy rain, experts say that even days after Sunday’s escape, the animal’s highly developed sense of small can still pick up a fresh trail.

Bloodhounds are known for being tenacious trackers, said Brian Tierney, president of the National Police Bloodhound Association. They’re playing a key role in the search for Hardin, now in its sixth day.

They also save lives, as one young bloodhound did just two weeks ago in Maine. Millie, a 10-month-old hound tracked a 5-year-old girl with autism who went missing from her home on May 16, Maine State Police said. The dog found the girl waist-deep in water in a cedar swamp, the agency said. Authorities credited Millie’s dedication and “incredible nose” for saving the girl.

Heavy rain interrupted the search for Hardin

Bad weather confounded the hunt for Hardin, who was serving a 30-year sentence for murder when he escaped from the North Central Unit, a medium-security prison in Calico Rock, Arkansas.

The hound found – then lost – Hardin’s scent when heavy rains blew through the area, said state prison spokesman Rand Champion. Hardin was tracked for less than a quarter of a mile when the bloodhound lost the trail. The fugitive could have gone in any direction after that.

“That was one of the most frustrating things, that they were able to track him but then they lost him because of the rain,” Champion said.

Hardin took almost nothing with him and left behind plenty of clothes, bedsheets and other items that are used to familiarize the bloodhounds with his scent, Champion said. Those items are shared with the dogs to give them the initial scent of the person they are seeking, Tierney said. It’s a process that’s standard operating procedure for Arkansas’ prison dogs.

Who is Grant Hardin?

A former police chief in the small town of Gateway near the Arkansas-Missouri border, Hardin had been held at the Calico Rock prison since 2017 after pleading guilty to first-degree murder in a fatal shooting for which he was serving a 30-year sentence.

Hardin’s DNA was matched to the 1997 rape of a teacher at an elementary school in Rogers, north of Fayetteville. He was sentenced to 50 years in prison for that crime. Eventually, his notoriety led to a TV documentary, “Devil in the Ozarks.”

Champion said that someone should have checked Hardin’s identity before he was allowed to leave, describing the lack of verification as a “lapse” that is being investigated.

Bloodhounds live at Calico Rock prison

Authorities haven’t disclosed how many dogs are involved in the manhunt, but the Calico Rock prison is known for its bloodhounds that live in a kennel on prison property. The nearly one dozen dogs at the prison have helped many other agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to track a variety of people over the years, according to a 2021 state audit report on the prison.

Related Articles

Sellers outnumber prospective homebuyers as high prices and mortgage rates skew the housing market

Oreo maker Mondelez sues Aldi, alleging grocery chain copies its packaging to confuse customers

Wall Street drifts toward the end of what may be its best month since 2023

US inflation gauge cools with little sign of tariff impact, so far

Today in History: May 30, Babe Ruth plays last major league game

Southern prisons have a long history of keeping bloodhounds around in case of escapes, like the one featured in country artist Blake Shelton’s song “Ol’ Red,” about a hound that hunts escaped inmates with “a nose that could smell a two-day trail.”

Dogs in Arkansas’ prison system have also been used to help other agencies find people who are not dangerous, such as missing children, people with special needs or elderly people, Champion said.

The bloodhounds tend to raise a ruckus when they find their mark. But the prison system uses other types of dogs in searching for children and vulnerable people who go missing, and those dogs tend to lick people and make friends with them when they are found, Champion said.

Fugitives use spices, other means to foil bloodhounds

Fugitives being hunted by bloodhounds have been known to take extreme steps to throw the dogs off their trail, Tierney said.

Two convicted killers who broke out of a maximum-security prison in upstate New York in 2015 collected dozens of containers of black and cayenne pepper before their escape. They had intended to use the pepper “to interfere with tracking dogs they assumed would be part of a manhunt for them after the escape,” a state investigation found. One of the men was shot and killed during the manhunt; another was also shot but survived and was captured.

Tierney said he’s heard of other methods used by fugitives to evade tracking dogs. Among them: Sleeping in trees could allow one’s scent to disperse before reaching the ground, he said.

Hardin has troubled past in law enforcement

In his first job as a police officer 35 years ago in the college town of Fayetteville, home of the University of Arkansas, Hardin struggled almost immediately, his supervisors said. “Other recruits do not like Grant,” one wrote in a performance review.

After a few months on the job, most shift supervisors concluded that he was “not suited for police work,” Fayetteville’s police chief at the time wrote to the director of the state commission on enforcement standards in the spring of 1991.

But after being dismissed by Fayetteville police, he kept getting hired for other law enforcement jobs in northwest Arkansas. In documents and interviews, other police leaders echoed what Fayetteville’s police chief had said — that Grant should not have become a police officer.

By the time he was the police chief in the small town of Gateway in 2016, “he was out chasing cars for no reason,” Cheryl Tillman, the town’s current mayor, recalled in the documentary “Devil in the Ozarks.”

He’s also been described by those who know him as a smart and cunning person who has learned many police tactics over the years and knows how law officers hunt fugitives.

“That individual probably watched the extended forecast before he went out,” Tierney said. “He would know that heavy rain is going to hinder the dogs.”

Associated Press Writer Hallie Golden in Seattle contributed.

By ALEX VEIGA, Associated Press Business Writer

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Homeowners eager to sell may have to wait a while before a buyer comes along.

As of April, the U.S. housing market had nearly 34% more sellers than buyers shopping for a home, according to an analysis by Redfin.

Aside from April 2020, when the pandemic brought the economy and home sales activity to a standstill, there haven’t been this few buyers in the market for a home before, based on records that date back to 2013.

The trend is good news for home shoppers — if they can afford to buy at current mortgage rates and prices, which are still rising nationally, albeit more slowly.

Fewer buyers means less competition for home listings and more pressure on sellers to dial back their asking price and make other concessions to help get a deal done. That’s a stark reversal from just a few years ago, when it wasn’t uncommon for homeowners to receive offers well above their asking price from multiple home shoppers.

Related Articles

Bloodhounds hunting ‘Devil in the Ozarks’ fugitive are seen as key part of manhunt

Oreo maker Mondelez sues Aldi, alleging grocery chain copies its packaging to confuse customers

Wall Street drifts toward the end of what may be its best month since 2023

US inflation gauge cools with little sign of tariff impact, so far

Today in History: May 30, Babe Ruth plays last major league game

“The balance of power in the U.S. housing market has shifted toward buyers, but a lot of sellers have yet to see or accept the writing on the wall,” said Asad Khan, a senior economist at Redfin.

The lopsided balance between buyers and sellers is reflected in home sales, which remain in a slump going back to 2022, when mortgage rates began to climb from the rock-bottom lows they reached during the pandemic. Last year, sales of previously occupied U.S. homes sank to their lowest level in nearly 30 years. Sales fell last month to the slowest pace for the month of April going back to 2009.

Sellers began outnumbering buyers in November 2023, when the average rate on a 30-year mortgage climbed to a 23-year high of nearly 8%, according to mortgage buyer Freddie Mac. The average rate reached 6.89% this week, its highest level since early February.

All told, there were 1.9 million sellers and 1.5 million prospective homebuyers in April, or 490,041 fewer people in the market for a home relative to sellers. A year ago, there were 6.5% more sellers than buyers. Two years ago, buyers outnumbered sellers by 5.3%.

Redfin based its estimate of the number of sellers in April on active listings, or the number of homes for sale at any point during the month. It estimated the pool of people in the market for a home by creating a model that takes several other data into account, including the typical time it takes for a someone to buy after taking a tour of a home.

Faced with a market with fewer potential buyers, some sellers have opted to lower prices or offer sales incentives, such as agreeing to pay for a buyer’s closing costs or other expenses. Nearly 1 in 5 home listings had their price reduced last month, according to Realtor.com.

The growing imbalance between buyers and sellers should pull U.S. home prices 1% lower by the end of this year, according to Redfin.

Prices have already begun to decline in select metro areas. In the four weeks ended April 20, home prices fell in 11 of the top 50 most populous U.S. metro areas, including Dallas, Oakland, California, and Jacksonville, Florida, according to Redfin.

The market with the biggest gap between buyers and sellers is Miami, where sellers outnumber buyers by about 3 to 1, according to Redfin. The strongest seller’s market is Newark, New Jersey, with 47.1% fewer sellers than buyers.

Despite tipping more in favor of buyers, the housing market is likely to remain unaffordable for many Americans. The median U.S. home sales price has jumped 53% over the past six years, far outpacing wage growth.

And while the inventory of previously occupied U.S. homes climbed last month to the highest level since September 2020, it’s still well below pre-pandemic era levels and short on properties that most Americans can afford.

Before the pandemic, households earning $75,000 a year could afford to buy nearly half of all homes on the market nationally. As of March, only 21.2% of home listings were affordable, according to a recent analysis by the National Association of Realtors. A home is considered affordable if monthly payments don’t exceed 30% of household monthly income.

“Without a significant boost in housing inventory at price points below $260,000, the path to homeownership will remain blocked for millions of Americans who are otherwise financially ready to buy,” according to the NAR report.

By LINDSAY WHITEHURST, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Friday again cleared the way for the Trump administration to strip temporary legal protections from hundreds of thousands of immigrants for now, pushing the total number of people who could be newly exposed to deportation to nearly 1 million.

The justices lifted a lower-court order that kept humanitarian parole protections in place for more than 500,000 migrants from four countries: Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. The court has also allowed the administration to revoke temporary legal status from about 350,000 Venezuelan migrants in another case.

Republican President Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail to deport millions of people, and in office has sought to dismantle Biden administration polices that created ways for migrants to live legally in the U.S. Trump amplified false rumors that Haitian immigrants in Ohio, including those with legal status under the humanitarian parole program, were abducting and eating pets during a debate with then-President Joe Biden, according to court documents.

His administration filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court after a federal judge in Boston blocked the administration’s push to end the program.

Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson wrote in dissent that the effect of the high court’s order is “to have the lives of half a million migrants unravel all around us before the courts decide their legal claims.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor joined the dissent.

Related Articles

Think your return to the office was rough? Musk faces some big challenges

Google, Justice Department face off in climactic showdown in search monopoly case

Trump has long warned of a government ‘deep state.’ Now in power, he’s under pressure to expose it

Trump’s big plans on trade and more run up against laws of political gravity, separation of powers

Elon Musk came to Washington wielding a chain saw. He leaves behind upheaval and unmet expectations

Jackson echoed what U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani wrote in ruling that ending the legal protections early would leave people with a stark choice: flee the country or risk losing everything. Talwani, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, found that revocations of parole can be done, but on a case-by-case basis.

Her ruling came in mid-April, shortly before permits were due to be canceled. An appeals court refused to lift her order.

The Supreme Court’s order is not a final ruling, but it means the protections will not be in place while the case proceeds. It now returns to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston.

The Justice Department argues that the protections were always meant to be temporary, and the Department of Homeland Security has the power to revoke them without court interference. The administration says Biden granted the parole en masse, and the law doesn’t require ending it on an individual basis.

Taking on each case individually would be a “gargantuan task,” and slow the government’s efforts to press for their removal, Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued.

Biden used humanitarian parole more than any other president, employing a special presidential authority in effect since 1952.

Beneficiaries included the 532,000 people who have come to the United States with financial sponsors since late 2022, leaving home countries fraught with “instability, dangers and deprivations,” as attorneys for the migrants said. They had to fly to the U.S. at their own expense and have a financial sponsor to qualify for the designation, which lasts for two years.

The Trump administration’s decision was the first-ever mass revocation of humanitarian parole, attorneys for the migrants said. They called the Trump administration’s moves “the largest mass illegalization event in modern American history.”

The case is the latest in a string of emergency appeals the administration has made to the Supreme Court, many of them related to immigration.

The court has sided against Trump in other cases, including slowing his efforts to swiftly deport Venezuelans accused of being gang members to a prison in El Salvador under an 18th century wartime law called the Alien Enemies Act.

A few months after signing head coach Kevin O’Connell to a multiyear contract extension, the Vikings announced on Friday morning that they have done the same with general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah.

“I’m beyond excited to continue this journey with the Vikings,” Adofo-Mensah said in a team news release. “This organization means so much to me, and I’ve always believed in what we’re building here.”

In his statement, Adofo-Mensah went on to thank the Wilf family for trusting him to lead the franchise into the future and expressed excitement that he gets to continue to work alongside O’Connell in their pursuit of a Super Bowl.

This always felt like the expected outcome, even if it took some time to come to fruition. Asked a couple of months ago about not having a contract extension under his belt, Adofo-Mensah calmly downplayed the situation.

Maybe because he was confident that both sides would be able to agree to terms at some point.

“It’s a process,” Adofo-Mensah said at the time. “These things take time.”

Now, it appears the time is right for the Vikings.

In a release, co owner Mark Wilf lauded Adofo-Mensah for his leadership, vision and collaboration with the coaching staff, adding, “His dedication and forward-thinking approach have been instrumental in shaping our roster and future.”

In a release, co-owner Zygi Wilf credited Adofo-Mensah for his commitment to building a team that can compete for a Super Bowl, adding, “We are extremely excited to continue this journey with Kwesi in this role and confident in the direction he and Kevin are leading our organization.”

There have been highs and lows for Adofo-Mensah throughout his tenure.

Though his critics will point to the 2022 draft class as his biggest failure, and rightfully so considering most of those players are no longer on the roster, the 2024 free-agent class represents the other side of that spectrum.

That was a watershed moment for the franchise last offseason as the Vikings managed to add quarterback Sam Darnold and running back Aaron Jones on offense, along with edge rusher Jonathan Greenard, edge rusher Andrew Van Ginkel and linebacker Blake Cashman on defense.

Not to be outdone, Adofo-Mensah followed it up by spending upwards of $300 million on free agents this offseason, improving the Vikings with a number of additions, including center Ryan Kelly and right guard Will Fries on offense, and tackles Jonathan Allen and Javon Hargrave on defense.

Some other highlights for Adofo-Mensah include his draft-day maneuvering to select quarterback J.J. McCarthy with the 10th overall pick, extending the contract of star receiver Justin Jefferson, and trading for star tight end T.J. Hockenson, among a handful of other savvy moves.

The next step for the Vikings is continuing to chase a Super Bowl.

“While we’ve made significant strides already, our focus will remain on building a team positioned as a perennial contender,” Adofo-Mensah said in a release. “This extension signifies we are on solid ground with the long-term vision we have set, and I’m incredibly excited to work with this group of talented people as we continue to push the boundaries of what this franchise can achieve.”

Related Articles

The importance of Justin Jefferson’s attendance at Vikings OTAs

J.J. McCarthy’s goal during Vikings OTAs? ‘Not being afraid to fail’

Five storylines to keep an eye on as the Vikings start OTAs

NFL teams can keep using the tush push after ban proposal fails at owners meetings

NFL owners unanimously approve player participation in Olympic flag football for 2028