Riverside County

Think your commute is bad? Others have it worse -- unless you happen to live in Lake Elsinore. The U.S. Census Bureau on Tuesday released new data showing how long it takes people to get to work. In Southern California, Lake Elsinore in Riverside County topped the list, with residents taking an average of 41.8 minutes to get to work. Palmdale and Adelanto were just behind at 40.5 minutes. The report, which examined data collected between 2006 and 2008, confirms something veteran commuters know well: The worst drives to work are often shared by residents who live in far-flung suburbs.

One of Southern California's toughest commutes is about to get somewhat easier. Officials today will break ground on a $59.5-million project to widen the eastbound side of 91 Freeway with the hope of easing congestion for commuters along the heavily traveled stretch between Orange and Riverside counties. The section has long been considered one of the worst freeway bottlenecks in the nation, connecting bedroom communities in the Inland Empire to job centers in Orange and L.A. counties.

The Riverside County Board of Supervisors suspended an ordinance limiting protest outside a Church of Scientology complex near Hemet, one week after its passage. The board suspended the measure temporarily, saying it didn't clearly define where demonstrators could assemble and what form their protests could take. Last week, Supervisor Jeff Stone introduced the measure requiring protesters to remain 50 feet from the property line of any private residence in unincorporated parts of the county.

A onetime barber used a road flare to set a homeless man on fire after pouring gasoline on him, prosecutors said today in filing a capital murder case against the accused killer. L.A. County Head Deputy Dist. Atty. William Hodgman said Ben Matthew Martin, 30, was charged with one count of murder with special circumstance allegations of murder by torture and murder by means of lying in wait in connection with the killing of John Robert McGraham. The special circumstances allegations make Martin eligible for the death penalty if convicted.

A lost goat wandering through a busy intersection was corralled inside a Carl's Jr. Wednesday morning where it charged its reflection in the glass doors a few times before being taken away by Riverside County animal control. The incident began in Mira Loma when a woman sitting in the restaurant's drive-through lane spotted the goat traipsing along busy Limonite Avenue. The unidentified woman got out and led the animal inside the restaurant, said John Welsh, spokesman for the county Department of Animal Services.

Linda Soubirous understood what it meant to the families of police officers and firefighters when state lawmakers ensured that they would receive health insurance for life if their loved ones were killed in the line of duty. She was 31, with a year-old daughter and pregnant, when her husband, a Riverside County sheriff's deputy, was fatally shot three years earlier, in 1993. Soon after, the county compounded the devastation by refusing to pay for the family's insurance as if he had voluntarily quit his job. Now, Soubirous is worried that other survivors will endure the same trauma if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger succeeds with a little-noticed plan to suspend the 1996 law because of the state's budget crisis, along with about 30 others put in place over decades to address the needs of Californians.

Fireworks: Friday Calendar's guide to local fireworks displays listed an event in Fontana as being in Riverside County. Fontana is in San Bernardino County.

A man and woman from Orange County who were found shot to death in La Cresta appeared to be involved in a murder-suicide, authorities said Monday. The bodies of Juan Arellano Donate, 26, of Garden Grove, and Mirian Yazmin Arredondo Garcia, 19, of Santa Ana, were discovered on Saturday near Hombre Lane in an unincorporated area of Riverside County west of Murrieta. The two had been in a relationship, which ended a month ago, according to Lake Elsinore police. Donate had apparently been trying to rekindle the relationship, police said.

The brother-in-law of convicted arsonist Raymond Lee Oyler, who was sentenced to death in June for setting the Esperanza fire in 2006 that killed five U.S. Forest Service firefighters, surrendered to authorities Friday after a warrant was issued for his arrest on seven charges of jury tampering. Christopher Vaughn Hill, 46, gave himself up to Corona police after fleeing investigators who arrived at his Hesperia home with a search warrant earlier this month. The Riverside County district attorney's office said that during Oyler's trial in February, Hill had put photocopies of a newspaper article on jurors' cars.

Mortgage delinquencies will continue to rise and set records the rest of this year in California, according to projections to be released today by TransUnion, one of the three big U.S. credit-reporting companies. The good news from TransUnion's number-crunching is that, even in the tarnished Golden State, the trend may finally reverse itself by the middle of next year. Before that can happen, lenders must first work through scads of backed-up problem loans clogging their pipelines, F.J. Guarrera, vice president for banking at the Chicago data analyzer, said in an interview Monday.