Nicholas Riccardi

DENVER -- Every January, amid the martini bars and gastropubs that line this ambitious city's downtown, a procession of long-horned cattle and cowboys weaves through the streets of Denver.

The parade is the climax of the National Western Stock Show, which has been an annual staple of mile-high winters for 105 years.

During 16 days in an arena three miles northeast of Denver's high-rises, luxury condos and spiffy new art museum, ranchers and breeders from throughout the West show off their wares to hundreds of thousands of spectators. It's a rodeo, horse show and trade show all at once. Outside of Broncos pro football and killer powder at A-Basin, there's little else that gets this town as excited.

Which is why it came as a shock to many when the Stock Show announced last month that it wanted to leave Denver. And, to add insult to injury, the show's desired destination is the neighboring suburb of Aurora.

Montana authorities on Tuesday scaled down a search for a militia member accused of firing on two sheriff’s deputies, saying the practiced survivalist and ex-convict could easily have traveled dozens of miles through the state’s jagged western mountains.

PHOENIX -- April was a tough month for the man who likes to call himself America's toughest sheriff.

First, auditors found that Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's office took $99 million in tax money that was supposed to fund jails and improperly spent it on roundups of suspected illegal immigrants and investigations into the sheriff's political foes.

Then a federal judge ruled that Arpaio's deputies violated the constitutional rights of a legal immigrant and his U.S. citizen son by detaining them for several hours during one of the sheriff's controversial immigration raids.

Most significantly, Arpaio's longtime second-in-command, Chief Deputy David Hendershott, resigned after an internal corruption probe found he violated department policies in supervising investigations into Arpaio's critics. Federal prosecutors are also investigating the allegations and whether the sheriff has abused his power.

Arpaio, as he normally does, shrugs it all off.

DENVER -- Douglas County, a swath of subdivisions just south of here that is one of the nation's wealthiest, is something of a public school paradise.

The K-12 district, with 60,000 students, boasts high test scores and a strong graduation rate. Surveys show that 90 percent of its parents are satisfied with their children's schools.

That makes the Douglas County School District an unlikely frontier in the latest battle over school vouchers.

But a new, conservative school board is exploring a voucher system to give parents -- regardless of income -- taxpayer money to pay for their children to attend private schools that agree to abide by district regulations. If it's implemented, parents could receive more than $4,000 per child.

After two years of declines, the number of illegal immigrants living in the United States was virtually unchanged last year, according to a report released Tuesday by the Pew Hispanic Center.

The annual report, relied upon by both sides in the contentious immigration debate, found 11.2 million illegal immigrants living in the U.S., statistically identical to the 11.1 million estimated in 2009. The number peaked in 2007 at 12 million and dropped steadily as the economy collapsed.

TUCSON, Ariz. -- As her mother tells it, 9-year-old Brisenia Flores had begged the border vigilantes who had just broken into her house: "Please don't shoot me."

But they did -- in the face at point-blank range, prosecutors allege, as Brisenia's father sat dead on the couch and her mother lay on the floor, pretending that she too had been killed in the gunfire.

Even as this city continues to mourn the victims of the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, another tragedy took center stage on Tuesday, as opening arguments began in the trial of a member of a Minutemen group accused of killing Brisenia and her father, Raul Flores Jr.

TUCSON, Ariz. -- The caller's name is Avery, and as the call progresses he seems a case study in incendiary talk radio rhetoric.

In a slightly shaky voice, Avery reads from a book by Laura Ingraham, a syndicated conservative radio host whose show is on a couple of hours later on the local right-wing talk station, 104.1 The Truth.

The passage speaks about the need to emulate the country's Founding Fathers and fight back against the federal government.