Professional Misconduct

ABC News is being accused of checkbook journalism after landing the first sit-down interview with Joe Jackson following the recent death of his pop superstar son, Michael. Segments of a 45-minute interview with the Jackson family patriarch have already aired on ABC's "Nightline" and "Good Morning America," but the bulk of the interview will air tonight on the network as part of its summer series "Primetime Family Secrets." Mediabistro.

Aurora Ponce is senior class president, boasts a near-perfect A average and is UC-bound with plans to study engineering. But according to the 18-year-old and her supporters, officials at the Accelerated School, a collection of South Los Angeles charter schools, have barred Ponce from making her valedictory speech at Saturday's graduation as punishment for participating in a student sit-in to protest increased class sizes and the elimination of college prep classes.

For seven years, the Los Angeles Unified School District has paid Matthew Kim a teaching salary of up to $68,000 per year, plus benefits. His job is to do nothing. Every school day, Kim's shift begins at 7:50 a.m., with 30 minutes for lunch, and ends when the bell at his old campus rings at 3:20 p.m. He is to take off all breaks, school vacations and holidays, per a district agreement with the teacher's union. At no time is he to be given any work by the district or show up at school.

When the identity of Nadya Suleman's fertility doctor was made public this week, the Internet lit up with angry commentary. Many called for Dr. Michael Kamrava to be stripped of his medical license -- or worse -- for providing the fertility treatments that led to Suleman's 14 children, including last month's octuplets. Rosalind Saxton had a different reaction.

The request for drugs for Anna Nicole Smith slid off the fax of a Valley Village pharmacy five days after the model's son had died in the Bahamas. A psychiatrist wanted 300 tablets of methadone, two types of sedatives, a muscle relaxer, an anti-inflammatory drug and four bottles of a painkiller nicknamed "hospital heroin," unsealed court records show. The amount and combination alarmed the pharmacist, who later recalled thinking, "They are going to kill her with this." He phoned Smith's internist and said he had no intention of filling a prescription that amounted to "pharmaceutical suicide," according to court documents.

A doctor who treated AIDS patients admitted to watering down medications and pleaded guilty to fraud charges, the U.S. attorney's office announced Thursday. Dr. George Steven Kooshian, who practiced in Orange and Los Angeles counties, pleaded guilty Tuesday in Santa Ana federal court to a total of four counts of billing fraud and making false healthcare statements. The charges stem from Kooshian's treatment of two patients in 2000.

In the sweltering hub of Nicaragua's once-thriving banana industry, Juan Dominguez saw an opportunity. He arrived in Chinandega in 2002, shortly after watching a CNN report about men claiming they had become sterile from exposure to DBCP, a pesticide used on banana plantations in the 1970s. Until then, Dominguez was best known as the mustachioed personal injury lawyer pictured on the backs of Los Angeles buses and had no experience in international law.

Until last spring, Marc Engelman was a successful salesman for biotech giant Amgen Inc. His specialty: selling Enbrel, a powerful psoriasis treatment that costs nearly $20,000 a year. The highly profitable medication is approved only for patients with serious forms of the skin disease and comes with side effects including an increased risk of severe infection and congestive heart failure.

Los Angeles County prosecutors acknowledged Tuesday that they failed to inform a West Covina woman about a plea deal in December that allowed her estranged husband out of jail after he pleaded guilty to threatening her with a stun gun. The lapse is one of several decisions the district attorney's office is investigating after Curtis Bernard Harris, 34, kidnapped Monica Thomas-Harris, 37, and killed her before taking his own life over the weekend at a Whittier motel.

Los Angeles County auditors accused a private investigations company Wednesday of failing to fulfill a contract that required it to notify troubled parents if a judge was being asked to take away their children. Yoakum Investigations Inc. was hired in December 2005 by the Department of Children and Family Services to deliver notices to parents who were about to lose rights over their children.