Philadelphia (CNA/EWTN News) - According to federal data, since October 2014, 906 Muslim refugees from Syria were granted U.S. visas, while only 28 of Syria's estimated 700,000 displaced Christians were given the same. Even when accounting for population percentages (Christians account for 10 percent of the religious makeup of Syria), the numbers of visas granted seems widely disproportional.

Chaldean Archbishop Bashar Warda of Erbil and Melkite Archbishop Jean-Clement Jeanbart of Aleppo spoke at an Aug. 4 press conference at the Knights of Columbus 2015 Convention in Philadelphia about the situation for Christians in the Middle East.They said that while they do not believe the discrimination against giving Christians visas goes all the way to the top of America's administration, their people have noticed the injustice. "Our people are asking these questions: how come we apply for the American visa and are denied?" Archbishop Warda said.

Cody C. Delistraty, The Atlantic

Between 1853 and 1870, Baron Haussmann ordered much of Paris to be destroyed. Slums were razed and converted to bourgeois neighborhoods, and the formerly labyrinthine city became a place of order, full of wide boulevards (think Saint-Germain) and angular avenues (the Champs-Élysées). Poor Parisians tried to put up a fight but were eventually forced to flee, their homes knocked down with minimal notice and little or no recompense. The city underwent a full transformation—from working class and medieval to bourgeois and modern—in less than two decades' time.