Authored by Anders Corr via The Epoch Times,

The regime in China denies that it has plans for “hegemony or expansion,” but its history – from the peasant land seizures of the 1920s to claims on the entire South China Sea today – is replete with land grabs and territorial expansion.

Starting in 2021 with its first of four global initiatives, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has used ideas for such initiatives and Beijing-led international organizations as engines to extend its expansion toward its long-held goal of global hegemony.

The CCP’s four global initiatives are ostensibly related to development, security, civilization, and governance. They are meant to seem palatable to the international community while integrating the United Nations and other forms of global governance into the CCP’s own system, with itself in the lead.

The initiatives are currently expanding and strengthening. On Sept. 12, China expanded the digital element of its Global Development Initiative (GDI) by inviting additional countries to join its World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO). The organization was founded in July and is headquartered in Shanghai.

CCP leader Xi Jinping gave the keynote speech at the event. He called for “true multilateralism,” which analysts interpret as a justification for a parallel global order with Beijing in the lead.

WAICO already has approximately 30 member countries, including Russia and Iran. It serves as a key economic and intelligence initiative led by Beijing to expand the CCP’s global influence by promoting China’s AI software and cloud infrastructure.

The more countries use China’s AI assets, the more Beijing’s authoritarian approach to AI is normalized, and the more opportunities for global espionage and influence open up for China’s military and intelligence agencies.

More generally, the GDI uses a wedge strategy to increase the CCP’s influence in countries by aligning development aid with the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The resulting influence can then be expanded through larger Belt and Road Initiative projects such as ports, trains, roads, pipelines, and digital infrastructure.

This broader penetration turns countries toward joining the BRICS group, originally Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and now including Iran, among others. The group is economically dominated by Beijing, which expects BRICS countries to follow the CCP’s lead on relatively anodyne statements such as Middle East peace, as well as on more substantial international projects such as AI development and efforts to shift world trade away from the U.S. dollar. Xi has personally invited BRICS countries to join WAICO.

The Global Security Initiative (GSI) overlays China’s preexisting military partnerships, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), with the vision of a “common” security led by the CCP. The Beijing Xiangshan Security Forum, a key vehicle for extending the GSI to influential international military stakeholders, took place from Sept. 15 to Sept. 17. One subject during the forum was reportedly “the impact of AI on future warfare.”

The threat posed by the GSI and its networking with military and economic partners is real and current. Iran supports the GSI and is a member of the SCO. On Sept. 12, news broke that Chinese entities, most likely with the approval of the CCP, provided Iran with satellite images of U.S. forces in Jordan. Those images likely assisted Iran’s missile attack that killed three U.S. troops in July.

China has also provided Iran with dual-use components and fuel precursors for its missile and armed drone technologies used against Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Ukraine. Other than U.S. sanctions against a few Chinese companies, there were few repercussions imposed on the regime in China for providing Iran with dual-use items and satellite intelligence during a war. This signals to Beijing that it can provide the same to other SCO and BRICS countries in the future simply by changing the names and addresses of the Chinese entities involved.

Afghanistan, which hosts al-Qaeda terrorists, is an observer nation in the SCO and could also receive Chinese intelligence or equipment for use against the United States, Pakistan, or India. Beijing has long had a positive relationship with the Taliban in Afghanistan, which has suppressed non-Pashtun ethnicities in the country.

This accords with Beijing’s Global Civilization Initiative (GCI), which claims to create a more pluralistic world in part through supporting the sovereignty of dictators even as they stifle free markets, speech, and diversity within their own countries.

When Xi announced the GCI in 2023, he hypocritically said: “We advocate the common values of humanity. Peace, development, equity, justice, democracy and freedom are the common aspirations of all peoples. Countries need to keep an open mind in appreciating the perceptions of values by different civilizations, and refrain from imposing their own values or models on others and from stoking ideological confrontation.”

The hypocrisy of this position is evident because then and now, Xi’s regime militarily threatens democratic Taiwan; steals maritime territory from the Philippines, Vietnam, and other South China Sea claimants; takes Himalayan territory from India by force; and destroys the freedoms of religious minorities like the Uyghurs, Christians, and Falun Gong within China.

Now, with the CCP’s four global initiatives, this violent illiberality threatens to scale globally. Xi unveiled his Global Governance Initiative (GGI) last September at an SCO meeting in Tianjin. It promotes international law with the CCP in the lead and a coordinating function for the three prior initiatives.

According to Chinese state media, “Viewed as a unified framework, the four initiatives form a ‘four-in-one’ interactive structure: development as the foundation, security as the guarantee, civilization as the bond, and governance as the coordinating mechanism – all serving the overarching objective of building a community with a shared future for humanity.”

The CCP’s “community with a shared future for humanity” sounds acceptable on first blush but can be directly compared to Imperial Japan’s “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” in that both used anti-colonial rhetoric and regional economic integration to try and replace “Western hegemony” with an illiberal hegemony of its own making, led by an authoritarian and territorially aggressive power.

What could be called the CCP’s Quad-G Plan for global hegemony is dangerous to free markets, human rights, and democracy. The CCP is a totalitarian political party attempting to use the large economy of China, its diplomats, an international AI norms-setting body, and an already-existing international institutional structure at the United Nations and elsewhere as the power and tracks for moving an established U.S.-led international system with true sovereignty for members toward a global and illiberal hegemony with Beijing at the center.

The CCP’s Quad-G approach raises questions about whether U.S. national security and the safety of democracies everywhere necessitate significantly reducing the CCP’s influence at the United Nations and other international organizations, as well as expanding sanctions from targeting a few Chinese entities to targeting China as a whole.

Options at the U.N. include canceling the visas of China’s U.N. diplomats, as was done to Iranian diplomats in 2014 and 2020, to working to return China’s seat at the forum to democratic Taiwan. Though Taiwan does not currently propose this, other more powerful countries and groupings, including the United States, the European Union, and the G7 countries, should consider encouraging this idea to more effectively counter the CCP.

The more democratic countries legitimize the CCP by engaging with it diplomatically, the more latitude it has to influence other countries to depend on its financing, join CCP-led international partnerships, and fall in line with Beijing’s proposals to international organizations. This acclimates them and others to further accept the CCP’s leadership and its preferred authoritarian forms of global governance, with Beijing at the center.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of ZeroHedge.

Kalshi’s Ethereum perpetual futures contract has a favorite trade size, and it’s $5,499.

A CoinDesk analysis published Monday pulled 3,450 trades in the contract, a futures product with no expiry that tracks the spot price of ether, from 23 one-hour windows between September 17 and 20. Of those, 1,406 landed within $2 of $5,499. That’s $7.7 million of the $13.5 million sampled, or 57% of the dollar volume. Bitcoin perpetuals showed the same thing with different numbers: trades near $2,500 and $5,000 made up 54% of the $8.5 million sampled. Going back to June 19, CoinDesk found a recurring size on 43 of 46 sampled days, with the magic number migrating from $4,999 to $9,999 to $3,999, $4,499 and $5,499.

The fight started when Beni, a pseudonymous quant and co-founder of Stealth Neolab, posted that Kalshi’s ether perp was printing $539 million of 24-hour volume against $3.1 million of open interest, a ratio of 174 to one, and called the repeating $5,500 prints “undeniable proof” of wash trading. He also waved around an Artemis chart of prediction-market share, which is a different product from the perps, a mistake Kalshi’s crypto chief was happy to point out.

Hey Beni,

Seems like a bunch of wires got crossed here so I just wanted to set the record straight. Your original claim was that Kalshi’s crypto prediction market volume was fake. The chart from Artemis shows prediction market volume share, not perps. We don’t do rebates for… https://t.co/RudV9qzDNn pic.twitter.com/QSIpBu0Cm5

— IcoBeast.eth🦇🔊 (@icobeast) September 20, 2026

Kalshi’s rebuttal the next day was interesting. The exchange says the fixed-size prints come from one market maker resting orders of a set size and getting picked off by “many takers.” Its own numbers show the takers winning; in one hypothetical it walks through, the aggressors clear about $98,000. Self-trades are blocked at the matching engine, it runs surveillance for pre-arranged trades, and it has “seen no evidence of collusion or wash trades.”

Take all of that at face value and Kalshi has still described a market maker that loses money on every fill and keeps quoting anyway. The rebuttal explains why. Its example liquidity deal pays a firm $100,000 a month to keep bids and offers of at least $5,000 resting within 0.1% of each other, 95% of every hour. The money is for being on the book. A quote of exactly $5,000, or $5,499, is what a contract written that way produces.

The Subsidy Stack

Which raises the question Kalshi’s rebuttal doesn’t ask of itself: why does the market maker keep doing this? The answer is that Kalshi pays it to, through three separate programs.

The resting-liquidity stipend is the first. The second is a fee rebate. A June 24 filing with the CFTC set up a temporary program that hands self-clearing members back all of their net maker and taker fees on perps each month, with two guardrails: no double-paying incentives on the same volume, and no trade may end up net-negative in fees once the maker and taker sides are combined. Free trading for the biggest accounts, but not paid trading.

The third would go further. A September 2 filing cuts the taker fee on crypto perps to 0.3 basis points, or 0.003%, and pays the maker a net rebate of the same 0.3 basis points. The filing makes that live “upon Exchange notice, but not earlier than 5:00 PM ET on September 16, 2026.” Kalshi says the notice hasn’t gone out and the program isn’t running, so it can’t be what generated the September 17-20 tape. Nobody outside Kalshi can currently check that.

Kalshi also runs a retail-facing Volume Incentive Program that splits a cashback pool by each trader’s share of volume during reward periods. Market makers with existing agreements are excluded. Whether it touched the disputed markets isn’t disclosed.

Put together, the stipend pays one side to post the $5,499 quote and the fee rebate makes it free for the other side to hit it. The repeating number is the incentive structure working as written.

The CFTC Wrote The Memo Five Weeks Early

On August 12 the CFTC’s Division of Market Oversight put out a staff advisory, Letter 26-23, whose stated focus is “incentive programs established in connection with prediction markets.” It warns that “volume-based rewards with steep tiers or threshold bonuses can encourage participants to trade solely to reach volume targets, heightening risks of wash-trading, pre-arranged trading,” and, separately, that “market-maker programs that guarantee net profits or cover participant losses through stipends and rebates may incentivize artificial strategies.” Exchanges are told to build surveillance around the specific behavior each program invites.

The advisory names no exchange and finds nothing against anyone. Kalshi’s response, that CME, Cboe and NYSE all pay for liquidity too, is true and beside the point. 

Real Trades, Fake Signal

Rajiv Sethi, an economist at Barnard College, published the cleanest account of the mechanism on Wednesday – and it doesn’t necessarily point to cheating. In his reading, “the volume rewards paid by Kalshi to the market maker are flowing in part to aggressive traders who are able to move before stale orders can be cancelled.” The fee refund makes it worse, because refunding the taker’s fee “aggravates the adverse selection problem faced by liquidity providers.” His verdict: “By channeling funds to aggressive low latency traders through the market makers, the exchange is undoing the liquidity provision that the rewards were meant to boost.”

While we will provide a more detailed preview of the Trump/Xi summit in a subsequent post, there are signs that President Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, may emerge from their upcoming summit with an agreement about the artificial-intelligence industry, an increasingly prominent flash point between the world’s two biggest economies. But, as Bloomberg’s Jacob Gu  notes, fund managers say it’s unlikely to be significant enough to provide a sustainable boost to AI-related stocks.

Over the weekend, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, after hours of talks with Vice Premier He Lifeng in New York, said the two sides agreed to create what he called a “US-China AI dialogue” about the technology’s benefits and threats.

The following day, Liao Min, the Chinese Vice Finance Minister, and a key member of the delegation, told Bloomberg that staff from the two countries were working together toward the details of a potential agreement on AI, investment and trade.

Bessent will present Trump with an AI agreement to review before his meeting with Xi, Fox Business reported.

The importance of AI at the US-China talks is being highlighted by the expected presence of Sam Altman and other industry executives at Trump’s state dinner for Xi to be held later this week, and while US tech execs will be present (again),  Xi is unlikely to bring a delegation of corporate executives when he meets Trump,, the WSJ reported.

But Gary Tan, portfolio manager at Allspring Global Investments, said investors shouldn’t expect it to have much immediate impact on the business between the two countries. “Given past experiences, our sense is that Trump’s visit to China earlier this year with a heavyweight technology entourage did not ultimately translate into meaningful progress on technology or hardware restrictions,” he said.

“From our side, this still looks more symbolic than substantive, and investors should continue positioning for a prolonged AI race rather than an imminent policy breakthrough,” Tan added.

Ashwin Binwani, founder of private investment firm Alpha Binwani Capital, was similarly cautious, since Bessent highlighted safety issues rather than an easing of US export controls.

“A pop on that news is a fade candidate, not a trend to chase,” he said. “Diversify away from pure semiconductor concentration into the hyperscaler capex story, which has its own momentum independent of the summit.”

He said traders have been burned previously when policy discussions failed to result in more concrete steps like licensing or purchase deals. That’s not to say there’d be no potential stock-market impact: He said “a modestly constructive readout” could fuel a rebound in the most heavily shorted Hong Kong stocks as investors close out positions.

Oil prices reversed initial losses (Brent back above $100) on Wednesday amid persistent Middle East supply risks, as investors weighed the prospect of improved Saudi export flows and U.S.-Iran diplomacy against the potential for further disruptions.

Saudi Arabia has begun testing its East-West pipeline for structural integrity and pressure, a step toward restoring oil flows after attacks knocked out the route earlier this month. Crude exports from the Red Sea port of Yanbu could restart within a couple of days if the tests are successful, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

U.S. envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff said in a post on X that American officials engaged in lengthy talks with the Iranian delegation through mediators on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly. The mediators shuttled between the two sides throughout the day and completed a round of discussions that the U.S. hopes will prove constructive and promising, he said.

Reports of fresh attacks this morning didn’t help any diplomatic optimism, but expectations (driven by last night’s API report) suggest crude stocks stabilizing while product stocks are drawing down…

API

• Crude +1.8mm

• Cushing +2.1mm

• Gasoline -2.2mm

• Distillates -2.2mm

DOE

• Crude +2.97mm

• Cushing +2.27mm

• Gasoline -1.69mm

• Distillates -428k

Cushing stocks bounced off ‘tank bottoms’ and crude inventories jumped last week while product stocks both saw modest draws…

The SPR saw a very modest 405k barrel drain last week – the second tiny drain in a row since the war began. Last week’s sizable Crude build was enbough to offset the drain and create only the second weekly build in total crude stocks since early April…

…as the caves hit ‘tank’ bottoms..

The dip in US distillates stocks leaves it 15% below seasonal averages (and a record low for this time of year)…

Crude production edged lower to 13.94 million barrels a day last week, down by 5,000 barrels a day from the previous week. The small drop came even as the number of rigs drilling rose for a third straight week, with another two units put into operation, according to Baker Hughes.

The 4-week moving average for US gasoline demand slipped by 49,000 per day for the EIA week, but remains within seasonal norms…

WTI was trading around $92 ahead of the official data and is maintaining those highs since…

Bank of America raised its Brent forecast for the second half of the year to $95 a barrel from $83, citing the large disruption to crude and refined-product supplies.

Continued skirmishes through year-end are now its most likely scenario, while alternative routes and escorted shipments through the Strait of Hormuz have mitigated some of the shortfall, Francisco Blanch of BofA Global Research said.

Damaged infrastructure and geopolitical tensions make a rapid normalization unlikely, he added.

Summary: Pezeshkian Addresses UN

As expected, the United States delegation immediately walked out as Iran’s president began speaking, in front of what was not a very well attended address to begin with. He listed out a series of war crimes by the US aggressor but an accompanying theme was Iranian defiance while under the bombs. He also featured the Minab girls school attack by the US, underscoring that innocent children were killed – but contrasting this with Iran’s response, saying it did not hit civilian populations

Iran’s enemies have been make to learn we will not surrender, Pezeshkian declared. “They imposed the war on us, but we proved that we are not afraid of fighting a war, one that is defensive in nature.”

Another theme was the ongoing hypocrisy over the fact that “atomic and nuclear bombs are in the hands of the Israeli regime, but the inspectors are sent to Iran.” Pezeshkian further recalled that Iran while behind the table of negotiations came under the surprise bombs of US and Israeli warplanes. He repeated that “Israel has the [nuclear] bombs… and has not allowed a single inspection, yet they are rewarded.”

He also said, “The US wants to sacrifice the population of a country in order to seek its illegitimate goals” and so “This will become a world much more dangerous for all of us.”

On Hormuz and the question of negotiations, he said that the strait cannot be used for passage of weapons that will be used against Iran. While Iran is ready for diplomacy it strands ready to keep using its military power, the Iranian leader said. Overall, the speech did not focus very heavily at all on the prospect of new talks with Washington – something perhaps intentionally left out to appease domestic hardliners in the Islamic Republic.

*  *  *

Watch: Iran’s President Pezeshkian speaks

Immediately upon the Iranian leaders starting his speech, the US delegation walks out.

Earlier: We once again have differing versions of a key meeting in the aftermath of a significant and rare US and Iranian diplomatic encounter. The Tuesday 3-hour meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York was headed by Tehran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, and on the other side by Trump’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.

The US side had called the talks “very productive” – with the suggestion that the Iranians were in the mood to compromise for the sake of achieving a swift ceasefire and peace deal. However, The Guardian reports Wednesday, “Iran has pushed back on claims that it dropped former preconditions for reopening the strait of Hormuz in surprise talks held in New York under the mediation of Qatar…”.

“Trump said the three-hour talks held in a room at the UN headquarters had gone very well and been very productive,” the report continues. “He suggested further talks were possible imminently, which led to the price of a barrel of Brent crude to fall to below $100 (£75) for the first time in two weeks. Witkoff said the talks had been ‘encouraging, constructive and successful.’“

In Tehran, foreign ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei did not convey that there has been any shift in Iran’s negotiating position:

“The interaction that took place with the American side was through Qatari mediation. This interaction was aimed at conveying Iran’s conditions, including the end of the war in all its dimensions, the cessation of American aggressive actions, the naval siege, and the economic war, the release of Iranian assets and so on.”

The Iranian delegation conveyed to the US side the precise five conditions that Tehran has been pushing all along, the Iranian official insisted..

Among the ‘biggest asks’ – which the Trump administration has thus far shown openness to – is the release of all Iranian frozen assets. Instead, Trump and his Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have only sought to tighten the anti-Tehran noose with ‘Economic D-Day’ and secondary sanctions targeting anyone still doing business with Iran.

On Sept. 20, the Iranian parliament speaker said that Tehran had “clearly communicated” its strict conditions to Washington via mediators:

• The chief negotiator warned that there would be “no return to the previous negotiating framework or reopening of the Strait of Hormuz” unless Iran’s preconditions were met.
• “We must both fight and negotiate,” Qalibaf said in remarks to the parliament, criticizing what he described as approaches that offer “no clear path to ending” the conflict. “This view…effectively takes the country toward an endless, exhausting war.”

Iranian ‘hardliners’ are said to be outraged upon learning of the Tuesday Kushner-Witkoff meeting, and so much of Tehran’s messaging in the aftermath has also been geared for domestic consumption:

Iranian Foreign Minister Araqchi’s move in dealing with Witkov was done without coordination with the relevant authorities, according to Tasnim, citing sources 

US state-funded RFERL has listed out the following responses from within Iran:

Some called for impeachment proceedings to be launched though they were not clear if they wanted Araqchi or Pezeshkian out of office. One user charged that the meeting was “an even bigger mistake” than Pezeshkian traveling to the US for the UN General Assembly.

“If anyone’s met and negotiated with the Americans, they better stay there. [Iran] is a country for honorable people,” wrote Vahid Azizi, an economist and former official at the Iranian National Tax Administration under hard-line late president Ebrahim Raisi.

Hard-line commentator Mohsen Maqsudi said it was “sheer stupidity” to negotiate with Washington while “under threat” and cause a drop in oil prices. Tehran has been hoping that the rise in fuel costs will pressure Trump into ending the war.

Hardliners ask: why negotiate with the Americans at all, and why provide optics which will push down the price of oil? Supreme National Security Council secretary Mohsen Rezaei has sought to calm domestic criticisms on Wednesday:

“If the United States does not comply,” he said, the Strait of Hormuz will remain closed and negotiations will not resume. He added that the U.S. must first “earn the trust of the Iranian people.”

Today, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, we engaged in lengthy talks with the Iranian delegation through the mediators, who shuttled between the two sides throughout the day. They successfully completed a round of discussions that we hope will prove…

— Special Envoy Steve Witkoff (@SEPeaceMissions) September 22, 2026

Like Washington, the Iranian side does not want to ‘endless war’ – but has also vowed to outlast the Trump administration. The US President himself has lately conceded that the Iranians are waiting till after the November midterm elections to strike a deal, expecting that the Republics will lose Congress.

With ‘hard’ economic data still somewhat muted, expectations were for a modest retracement in US PMIs from recently optimistic levels in preliminary September data.

Instead, the ‘soft’ survey data soared:

• Flash US Services PMI Business Activity Index: 58.7 vs 55.8 exp (August: 56.5). 59-month high.

• Flash US Manufacturing PMI: 57.0 vs 53.7 exp (August: 53.9). 52-month high. 

The headline flash S&P Global US PMI Composite Output Index rose from 56.0 in August to 58.4 in September, registering the fastest expansion since July 2021 and an acceleration of growth for a fourth successive month.

Growth was driven by the service sector, which reported the steepest rise in output for over five years, but a welcome development in September was an accompanying acceleration of manufacturing output growth to the fastest since April 2022. New order inflows also gathered pace in both sectors, with growth reaching the highest since March 2022 in the service sector and the highest since April 2022 in manufacturing. In both cases, demand was buoyed principally by the domestic market, as goods export volumes continued to fall and services exports rose only modestly.

“US business continues to boom, with output growing at the fastest rate for over five years in September,” said Chris Williamson, Chief Business Economist at S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Historical comparisons suggest that the latest survey data point to annualized growth of around 5% with a 4% gain now signalled for the third quarter as a whole…

To put the growth surge in context, barring the spike in demand following the opening up of the economy after the COVID-19 lockdowns, the latest improvement in business activity is the greatest recorded since early 2015 with Williamson noting that:

“Business is clearly booming now in both manufacturing and services.”

However, he adds, this growth is being accompanied by some of the most severe supply chain bottlenecks seen in the near-two-decade survey history if the pandemic is excluded, with companies also reporting increasing problems finding suitable staff.

Backlogs of work are consequently rising sharply. While this accumulation of uncompleted orders bodes well for the further expansion of output and capacity in the coming months, it also indicates that companies are developing more pricing power, and hence is a worry for the inflation outlook.

“Firms’ input costs have meanwhile jumped in September at the steepest rate for four years, with fuel and transport costs spiking higher thanks to the rise in oil prices seen during the month, which will add further to the upward pressure on selling prices and inflation in the coming months.”

As a result of all this, 10Y yields have spiked back above 5.00%…

…and rate-hike odds picked up modestly for October.

Authored by Ezra Reguerra via Cointelegraph,

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are expected to brief the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday as the body examines artificial intelligence risks and their implications for international security.

According to CNBC, the UN confirmed Altman and Amodei’s participation.

Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue and Yoshua Bengio, co-chair of the UN’s Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, are also expected to take part.

Reuters reported that the Security Council meeting will examine growing concerns over AI’s impact on international security.

Chinese AI companies DeepSeek and Moonshot have been invited to make statements at the meeting, according to Reuters.

DeepSeek is expected to participate, though its founder Liang Wenfeng does not plan to attend, the report said, citing a source familiar with the matter.

The Security Council first formally discussed artificial intelligence in 2023, Reuters reported, as governments began examining its security implications.

France is convening the Security Council meeting on Wednesday. Reuters reported that the discussion comes amid growing concerns about increasingly capable AI systems and the potential loss of human control.

Cointelegraph reached out to Anthropic, OpenAI and the UN spokesperson’s office for confirmation and comment but had not received responses before publication.