Dear all, just a few comments on recent issues. The role of local ties in the inter-technique combination requires to pay attention not only to technical aspects of tie application/removal but especially to the quality level of the measured tie itself. To accomplish the IERS objective to have frequent and accurate measurements of the local ties, the CPP could act as a permanent monitoring of the 'combinability' of the intra-technique solutions, based on the local tie information. Anomalies and inconsistencies of the local ties can be monitored via the combined time series. In our point of view the weekly combinations should be intended as a tool to monitor the combination quality, the newly generated intra-technique products in view of the issue of a periodic official ITRF. At least in this phase of the CPP, the weekly combined inter-technique solution is not intended for a broad distribution, but could be used internally for benchmarking purposes of the combination process (fine tuning of the input, of the combination algorithms and of the quality and stability of the input solutions). On the other hand, we agree that there is an urgent need of long time series of geodetic solutions, in order to be able to generate an official combined product, and this issue is currently far from being defined/explored. The "API" consortium is presently working on the inter-technique combination algorithms and procedures. A prototypal automatic procedure is under refinement, using a loose constraint approach. We foresee that at the time of the december CPP meeting, preliminary test results should be available. BUT we are still in trouble concerning the attendance of the meeting, due to governmental restrictions, a lot of us are not allowed to travel to S. Francisco and by now we are not able to confirm our contribution to the CPP meeting! Cecilia and Roberto -- Roberto Devoti Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) Centro Nazionale Terremoti Via di Vigna Murata 605 00143 Roma, Italy Phone: +39 06 5186 0562 Fax: +39 06 5041 303 e-mail: devoti@ingv.it --- Cecilia Sciarretta Telespazio SpA Earth Observation Dept. Via Tiburtina 965 00156 Roma, Italy Phone: +39 06 4079 3864 Fax: +39 06 4079 6202 e-mail: cecilia.sciarretta@asi.it cecilia_sciarretta@telespazio.it -------------------------------------------------