Ville

A French hospital enlists donkeys in mental health care — and patients approve

From depression to schizophrenia, France's only hospital-based animal therapy unit is making the case that four legs can go where medicine alone cannot. When life gets you down, try petting a donkey — at least, that is one of the prescriptions at the Ville-Evrard hospital complex east of Paris. Tucked within its grounds, among 19th-century farm buildings and woodland, five donkeys are doing some of the mental health heavy lifting between hay-munching breaks.

Russian shadow fleet enabled by EU-linked insurers, investigators say

BRUSSELS — Ships illegally transporting sanctioned Russian oil are still operating with insurance ultimately backed by European financial markets, according to analysts and a lawmaker tracking the tankers. Russia’s so-called shadow fleet uses intermediaries and, ultimately, “European and Western banking organizations” to channel money and “basically wash the insurance through these middle hands,” said Ville Niinistö, chair of the European Parliament’s Delegation to the EU-Russia...

Technical note on Sequential Test-Time Adaptation via Martingale-Driven Fisher Prompting

Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a theoretical framework for M-FISHER, a method for sequential distribution shift detection and stable adaptation in streaming data. For detection, we construct an exponential martingale from non-conformity scores and apply Ville's inequality to obtain time-uniform guarantees on false alarm control, ensuring statistical validity at any stopping time. Under sustained shifts, we further bound the expected detection delay as...

Paris frozen in time in May 1970 – in pictures

In March 1970, Paris announced an amateur photography competition C’était Paris en 1970 to create an archive of a city undergoing a proliferation of large-scale urban development projects. A grid system divided the city into 1,755 squares and a photographer was charged with documenting each square during May 1970. Some of the 91,655 photographs taken are on display at the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris until 7 October 2026 Continue reading...

'Animal medicine': Therapy donkeys help patients at French psychiatric hospital

'Animal medicine': Therapy donkeys help patients at French psychiatric hospital Patients staying in a psychiatric hospital near Paris have been singing the praises of a novel treatment: spending time with therapy donkeys. Experts and patients say caring for the animals, which are known for their calm and social nature, helps improve emotional regulation, communication, social interaction and self-esteem. Therapy donkeys are helping patients with mental health conditions recover in a...

The return of France’s train of marvels: from the Côte d’Azur to the Southern French Alps