Riverside

When Sheyenne Reyes was growing up in Riverside she could always find a seat on the public bus. Reyes is 21 now, and while waiting for the Route 1 line to take her to work last week, the college student lamented that these days the bus often "gets too crowded to the point where some people have to stand up - they stumble a little bit" as the bus rushes from one stop to another. Standing nearby with his wife and infant daughter, 24-year-old Trayvor Chandlis said that he's looking for work and that his family rides the bus because of high gas prices.

Fashion heiress Patricia Gucci has listed her estate in Mountain Center for $9 million. The Riverside County compound consists of a nearly 11,000-square-foot main house, a guest house, tennis court quarters, a swimming pool with spa and a kennel. The contemporary Moroccan-style estate has a screening theater, a library, 10 bedrooms and 10 bathrooms. Built in 1989, the two-level house sits on 23 acres in a gated community. It has views of Coachella Valley, Joshua Tree National Park and mountain ranges.

Riverside's Josesito Lopez landed the richest payday of his career as a replacement foe against the larger and more powerful Saul “Canelo” Alvarez in September. Lopez lost the fight, but the determination it took to take the bout is at play again in a civic battle. A Washington, D.C.-based group advocating the separation of church and state has threatened to sue the city of Riverside should it continue to own land on Mt. Rubidoux, where a large cross stands. An online petition campaign is underway urging the city not to sell the small parcel of land where the cross stands.

A Riverside man arrested on suspicion of plotting to join Al Qaeda with three other suspects was ordered Monday to be held without bail until trial. Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym found that Arifeen Gojali, 21, was too much of a flight risk and danger to the community, based on the allegations by federal investigators. Gojali was led by federal marshals into U.S. District Court in Riverside on Monday, bound by handcuffs and leg irons and wearing a bright orange, jail-issued uniform.

The Mission Inn Hotel & Spa in Riverside flips the switch on millions of holiday lights and animated figures for the 20th year on Friday. The Festival of Lights at the historic Riverside hotel begins each year the day after Thanksgiving with fireworks, carolers, Santa Claus and, of course, the amazing lights. For two weeks, the national historic landmark comes to life with characters dressed in 17th century costumes, carolers, Santa Claus, horse-drawn carriage rides and even a pop-up ice-skating rink near the hotel.

Through seven years of disputes, a proposed rock quarry site in Riverside County has been called a job creator, an economy killer, an environmental disaster and even a creation site. The debate ended Thursday, when the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians agreed to purchase 354 acres of the mountaintop site for $3 million and pay developer Granite Construction $17.35 million to end the dispute. Pu'eska Mountain, as the quarry site is known, "is our people's place of creation," said Pechanga Chairman Mark Macarro.

SAN FRANCISCO - Two UC campuses received important endorsements Thursday for long-stalled projects: a new medical school at Riverside and a major classroom building at Merced. The UC regents included a proposed $15 million to help run the medical school and $45 million for the Merced building in their 2013-14 budget request to the governor and Legislature. The regents said they were more optimistic than in the past about their chances since state tax revenues are improving. Meanwhile, about 60 student protesters - demanding that any new UC revenue be used to freeze tuition or roll it back - blocked an intersection for several hours near the UC San Francisco facility where the regents were meeting.

In the run-up to election day, a Riverside County private investigator said he was hired to gather dirt on two Costa Mesa councilmen seeking re-election, and sent a woman into a local sports bar to flirt with one of the elected leaders with the hope of catching him behaving inappropriately. The alleged setup came the same August night that the investigator called police to alert them that another councilman appeared to be driving under the influence. A subsequent field sobriety test revealed that Councilman Jim Righeimer was sober.

Stirred by a decade of astronomical growth, economic heartache and the rising political influence of Latinos, the Inland Empire proved treacherous territory last week for a Republican Party that just a decade ago considered it the new GOP frontier. Voters in Riverside and San Bernardino counties on Tuesday elected three Democrats to Congress - two Latinos and a gay Asian American - after having sent only two Democrats to Washington in the last four decades. Before the election, Republicans represented the city of Riverside in Congress, the state Senate and the Assembly.

The 10-year-old son of a Riverside neo-Nazi leader was just another killer when he shot his sleeping father on the couch on an early May morning last year, a prosecutor told a judge Tuesday. Sitting unshackled, the now 12-year-old boy listened as Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Soccio told a Riverside County judge that the sandy-haired boy knew that killing his father, Jeffrey Hall, 32, was wrong. Hall's role as a regional director of the National Socialist Movement is simply a "red herring," he said.