“…As primarily here we are concerned with positive solutions u, the nonlinearity = (u) is taken a smooth function, at least of class C 1 , defined on the half-axis u > 0. To showcase our results and to put the problems studied into context, we of course discuss various classes of nonlinearities with specific growth and singularities at infinity or zero, e.g., logarithimic-power type singularities or polynomial power-like growth or a combination of the two, as arising in many contexts and recent applications (see, e.g., [7,13,20,21,37,39,40] and the references therein). However, for the sake of the gradient estimates per se and many of the consequences, we keep the discussion general and do not make any specific structural assumptions on the nonlinearity .…”