Human rights in the EU return policy: the case of the EU-Albania relations

The examination of the approach of the EU return policy to Albania - a country to which the EU returns about one fifth of the total number of the third country nationals removed - demonstrates that the predominant focus of the EU return policy on the effectiveness and efficiency of returns has left little room for safeguarding the human rights of the returnees. The article finds that the return procedures of the readmission agreement that should guarantee the protection of human rights in the return process are not observed by the EU member states. There are insufficient guarantees that the reception and possible detention of returnees in Albania will offer a dignified treatment. Moreover, the readmission agreement opens the way for the return of asylum seekers to Albania in line with the `safe third country' practice in the absence of conditions that ensure effective access to fair and efficient asylum procedures and protection in the country

A generic model for spouse's pensions with a view towards the calculation of liabilities

We introduce a generic model for spouse's pensions. The generic model allows for the modeling of various types of spouse's pensions with payments commencing at the death of the insured. We derive abstract formulas for cashflows and liabilities corresponding to common types of spouse's pensions. We show how the standard formulas from the Danish G82 concession can be obtained as a special case of our generic model. We also derive expressions for liabilities for spouse's pensions in models more advanced than found in the G82 concession. The generic nature of our model and results furthermore enable the calculation of cashflows and liabilities using simple estimates of marital behaviour among a population

O, Miami: How a Festival Infused a City with Poetry

After receiving his MFA from FIU in 2008, P. Scott Cunningham launched his own poetry-focused faux-school, the University of Wynwood, which stages colorfully offbeat events in the geographic heart of Miami's art scene, reflecting Cunningham's desire to take contemporary poetry far from its academic comfort zone. What he eventually envisioned moved dramatically beyond the University of Wynwood's playfully unorthodox readings. Spurred on by a Knight Foundation arts grant, Cunningham brainstormed a project which would not only be a "world-class" event in itself, but transformational for Miami writ large. His idea? O, Miami -- a poetry festival as wry in tone and all encompassing in scope as its very name, one which would attempt to, with a nod to Joyce, make poetry general throughout the city. This is a report of the inaugural festival

Optimal Novikov-type criteria for local martingales with jumps

We consider local martingales $M$ with jumps larger than $a$ for some $a$ larger than or equal to -1, and prove Novikov-type criteria for the corresponding exponential local martingale to be a uniformly integrable martingale. We obtain criteria using both the quadratic variation and the predictable quadratic variation. We prove optimality of the coefficients in the criteria. As a corollary, we obtain a verbatim extension of the classical Novikov criterion for continuous local martingales to the case of local martingales with nonnegative jumps

Intervention in Ornstein-Uhlenbeck SDEs

We introduce a notion of intervention for stochastic differential equations and a corresponding causal interpretation. For the case of the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck SDE, we show that the SDE resulting from a simple type of intervention again is an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck SDE. We discuss criteria for the existence of a stationary distribution for the solution to the intervened SDE. We illustrate the effect of interventions by calculating the mean and variance in the stationary distribution of an intervened process in a particularly simple case.Comment: Extended version of article to be presented at the 18th EYS