The children at Miramonte Elementary School never complained about their third-grade teacher. Not, authorities said, when he blindfolded them, not when he put tape over their mouths or even placed live cockroaches on their faces.

He told them it was a game and then photographed them, creating images that would eventually lead to his arrest, investigators said of Mark Berndt, who is scheduled to be arraigned Wednesday on charges that he committed lewd acts on 23 boys and girls, ages 6 to 10, between 2008 and 2010. He has hired a lawyer and has made no statements to authorities, said Los Angeles County sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore.

The investigation began when a film processor found Berndt's photos more than a year ago. Since the discovery, the school district fired Berndt and police put him under surveillance.

"If it wasn't for the film processor, this could still be continuing today," said sheriff's Lt. Carlos Marquez.

Berndt was arrested Monday at his home in Torrance and was being held on $2.3 million bail.

Some parents picking up their pre-kindergarteners at the school on Tuesday complained that officials at the school in South Los Angeles should have notified them when the photos were found.

The California Supreme Court on Monday reinstated a man's second-degree murder conviction for killing a well-known San Diego surfer, overturning a 2010 ruling by a state appeals court that had reduced it to voluntary manslaughter.

The state's highest court said it disagreed with the decision by the 4th District Court of Appeals that cited insufficient evidence of implied malice by Seth Cravens when he delivered the single fatal punch to 24-year-old Emery Kauanui in 2007.

Cravens was found guilty in November 2009 of second-degree murder and sentenced to 20 year to life in prison. The court ruling Monday means he will continue to serve that sentence.

If the voluntary manslaughter conviction had stuck, he could have faced a maximum of 16 years in prison.

Nicknamed the "Flying Hawaiian," Kauanui was a fixture at San Diego's Windansea Beach, where his favorite surf break is now called "Emery's Left."

Prosecutors said Cravens and four other men had gone to the La Jolla house of the surfer's mother to retaliate after Kauanui accidentally spilled beer on one of the men earlier in the evening at a bar.

After a group attack on Kauanui, Cravens delivered the punch to his head that prosecutors said fractured his skull. He fell then died at a hospital four days later.

A judge overstepped his authority when he tried to ban enforcement around the world of an $18 billion judgment against Chevron Inc. for environmental damage in Ecuador, a federal appeals court said Thursday.

The three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals explained why it lifted the ban last year and blocked a judge from staging a trial to decide if the judgment was obtained fairly.

It said the judge has authority to block collection if Ecuadorean plaintiffs move against Chevron in New York, but law does not give him authority "to dictate to the entire world which judgments are entitled to respect and which countries' courts are to be treated as international pariahs."

The judgment came last February after nearly two decades of litigation that stemmed from the poisoning of land in the Ecuadorean rainforest while the oil company Texaco was operating an oil consortium from 1972 to 1990 in the Amazon. Texaco became a wholly owned subsidiary of Chevron in 2001.

Chevron obtained an order from U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan in March blocking Ecuadorean plaintiffs from trying to collect the $18 billion until he could stage a trial to determine whether the judgment was fraudulently obtained.

The Ecuadorean plaintiffs appealed Kaplan's ruling to the 2nd Circuit. The appeals court heard oral arguments and then issued an order in September lifting Kaplan's block on collection efforts. On Thursday, it went a step further, tossing out the portion of Chevron's challenge to the judgment that sought to block its enforcement anywhere in the world.