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Sorry, kids. Turkish archaeologists say they have uncovered the tomb of St. Nicholas, also known as Santa Claus. (Robert F. Bukaty/AP)
First the good news:
Whoever told you that Santa Claus was an impostor with a fake beard collecting a Christmastime check at the mall or a lie cooked up by your parents to trick you into five measly minutes of quiet was, at minimum, misinformed.
The bad news: Santa Claus is definitely dead.
Archaeologists in southern Turkey say they have discovered the tomb of the original Santa Claus, also known as St. Nicholas, beneath his namesake church near the Mediterranean Sea.
Saint Nicholas of Myra (now Demre) was known for his anonymous gift-giving and generosity. People believed he’d put coins in the shoes of anyone who left them out for him on his feast day, Dec. 6.
As the story goes, he was a monk who gave away his hefty inheritance and instead chose to help the poor and the sick.
He’s also a patron saint of sailors and was, of course, especially fond of children. (There’s one slightly bizarre story, more Halloween than Christmas, of St. Nicholas saving three children who had been “lured into the clutches of an evil butcher.”)
He was so popular, according to History.com, that he survived the Protestant Reformation, “when the veneration of saints began to be discouraged.”
It wasn’t until the 16th century that St. Nicholas began to take on his modern, candy-cane hued form in images and imaginations. In Europe, he became known as Father Christmas.
[You’re never too old to believe in Santa’s magic]
He migrated to the Americas with the Dutch, who called him “Sinterklass” and gathered every year on the anniversary of his death. He started making appearances in stores in the 1840s, according to History.com.
The writer Clement Clarke cemented the American image of Santa Claus with his poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” which begins with the words ” ’Twas the night before Christmas.”
Now, Santa is all but entrenched in the Christmas lexicon, the rosy-cheeked face of Christmas who is the subject of movies, perennial parental lies and debates about childhood materialism.
There is an annual argument about whether it’s okay to portray Santa as only white. There was a Santa photographed last year with a shovel near a fence on the U.S. border with Mexico, a dig at Trump’s immigration policies. And there was a Santa who’s been called a liar for a story about telling a dying child that he was Santa’s “number one elf.”
[Child crushed after Santa tells him to ‘lay off the hamburgers and french fries’]
Through it all, the remains of the real-life St. Nicholas were apparently the subject of a centuries-old case of mistaken identity and grave robbery.
According to the Telegraph, St. Nicholas died in A.D. 343 and was interred at St. Nicholas church in Demre, on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey.
In 1087, apparently, merchants dug up his bones and smuggled them to the Italian city of Bari, the Telegraph reported. It’s still a holy site, visited by Christians paying homage to St. Nicholas.
But archaeologists say pilgrims to the Basilica di San Nicola are praying to the wrong guy. The bones belong to another local priest, not one of the most famous saints, the Telegraph reported.
Archaeologists conducting recent surveys at the church in Demre found gaps beneath it. The shrine, they say, is underneath the church and untouched.
“We believe this shrine has not been damaged at all, but it is quite difficult to get to it as there are mosaics on the floor,” Cemil Karabayram, the head of Antalya’s Monument Authority, told the Turkish Hurriyet Daily News.
Karabayram told the newspaper that he’s confident that archaeologists can reach the tomb.
At that point, he believes, nearly 1,700 years after St. Nicholas died, he’ll give another gift to the people of Demre: Tourism dollars.
Read more:
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That appeared to have made an impression.
“There needs to be a more aggressive whole-of-government approach in terms of protecting our electoral system,” Mr. Warner said. “Remember, to make a change even in a national election doesn’t require penetration into 50 states.”
He added, “You could pick two or three states in two or three jurisdictions and alter an election.”
The Senate Intelligence Committee is one of three committees on Capitol Hill that have opened full-fledged investigations into the relationship between Mr. Trump, his associates and Russia. Given the committee’s jurisdiction over the intelligence community and a strong working relationship between Mr. Burr and Mr. Warner, it has been considered the congressional committee most likely to deliver a substantive report on Russia’s covert efforts.
Mr. Burr and Mr. Warner sought to inspire confidence on Wednesday that the committee remained on course to do so. They later got a boost from Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who said he concurred with their statements based on his committee’s work.
The senators said that their investigators have pored over nearly 100,000 pages of classified intelligence and documents turned over by the Trump campaign and other associates of the president’s, and they have conducted more than 100 interviews with many of the top officials connected to both the Trump campaign and the intelligence community. Investigators also recently received material from Facebook and, to a lesser extent, Twitter, about advertisements on their platforms linked to Russia.
“This feels like it’s taking a long time. It is taking a long time,” Mr. Warner said. “But getting it right and getting all the facts is what we owe the American people.”
Mr. Burr had expressed a desire this summer to conclude the inquiry by year’s end. But on Wednesday, he all but conceded that with so many avenues of investigation still open — 25 interviews are scheduled for the remainder of October alone — that would not be possible. While he declined to put a date on the investigation’s conclusion, he said that the committee planned to release portions of its findings before the 2018 midterm election primaries.
Still, there were areas of inquiry — and of speculation — that the senators said they felt reasonably confident were benign and could be set aside. They include changes made to the Republican Party platform before last year’s Republican National Convention and vague and unsubstantiated reports of a secret meeting last year at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington between Sergey I. Kislyak, then the Russian ambassador, and Jeff Sessions, then a senator and now the attorney general.
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In each case, Mr. Burr said the committee had interviewed all of the relevant witnesses and found no evidence of nefarious action.
“Campaign staff was attempting to implement what they believed to be guidance to be strong, to be a strong ally on Ukraine, but also leave the door open for better relations with Russia,” Mr. Burr said.
Mr. Burr was also unequivocal in saying that the integrity of the vote itself had been preserved, despite Russian attempts to test the vulnerabilities of 21 state election systems.
“We can certifiably say that no vote totals were affected,” Mr. Burr said, “that the tallies are accurate.”
He also repeatedly steered away from criticizing Mr. Trump, who has questioned the validity of intelligence assessments about the election. Mr. Burr said any questions of criminal acts were best left to the Justice Department’s special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.
In regard to other areas, the senators acknowledged that their work was either stuck or inconclusive. Mr. Burr said they had thus far been unable to get traction on the so-called Steele dossier, a series of memos with sensational claims about Mr. Trump and Russia. The memos’ author, Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent, has not agreed to meet with investigators or the senators.
“The committee cannot really decide the credibility of the dossier without understanding things like who paid for it, who were your sources and sub-sources,” Mr. Burr said. Without Mr. Steele’s input, he continued, the committee had found it “impossible” to rebuild the dossier beyond a certain date.
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And the committee has only just begun examining more than 3,000 ads turned over on Monday by Facebook. The company said the ads had been purchased by pages and profiles linked to the Internet Research Agency, a secretive company known for spreading Kremlin-linked propaganda, and investigators believe they are part of a highly coordinated disinformation campaign that sought to sow chaos and exploit divisive social issues.
The senators said that the committee itself would not release copies of the ads, but welcomed Facebook doing so if it so chooses as investigators continue to work to better understand the extent of the social media campaign.
The committee is also waiting for more information from Twitter. The company briefed congressional investigators last week, but Mr. Warner characterized its internal investigation of the issue as derivative and disappointing.
Google has started its own internal investigation and plans to cooperate with Congress. All three companies — Facebook, Twitter and Google — have been invited to testify publicly before the committee on Nov. 1.
Mr. Warner said he was optimistic that the companies were “recognizing that threat now.” He said Americans and political candidates deserved to know who was funding advertisements and why individual posts were trending.
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