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• WASHINGTON (AP) -- Nearly all of Greenland's massive ice sheet suddenly started melting a bit this month, a freak event that surprised scientists.
• Even Greenland's coldest and highest place, Summit station, showed melting. Ice core records show that last happened in 1889 and occurs about once every 150 years.
• Three satellites show what NASA calls unprecedented melting of the ice sheet that blankets the island, starting on July 8 and lasting four days. Most of the thick ice remains. While some ice usually melts during the summer, what was unusual was that the melting happened in a flash and over a widespread area.
• "You literally had this wave of warm air wash over the Greenland ice sheet and melt it," NASA ice scientist Tom Wagner said Tuesday.
• The ice melt area went from 40 percent of the ice sheet to 97 percent in four days, according to NASA. Until now, the most extensive melt seen by satellites in the past three decades was about 55 percent.
• ___

• LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Turmoil in Michael Jackson's family continued Tuesday as a family feud that has engulfed the singer's mother and children continued to play out in online posts, on national television and in a videotaped driveway confrontation that authorities continue to investigate.
• It should perhaps be no surprise that a family that has spent decades in the spotlight is airing its troubles in public, but the dispute has left many, including estate executors, worried.
• "We are concerned that we do what we can to protect them from undue influences, bullying, greed, and other unfortunate circumstances," executors John Branca and John McClain wrote in a letter posted on fan sites hours after deputies responded to a family disturbance at the hilltop home where Katherine Jackson and her three grandchildren live.

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