Chief Superintendent Benjardi Mantele said he has created Task Group Quezon, which will also be composed of eight sub-task groups. The task group will be in constant coordination with the Presidential Security Group (PSG) and other concerned agencies, he said.

Mantele and his deputy chief, Senior Superintendent Audie Arroyo, will oversee the command post at the Quezon shrine as well as personnel from the Bureau of Fire Protection.

The security personnel will be composed of policemen in plain clothes for “covert security,” traffic policemen, and fire fighters, Mantele said.

On board a vehicle, some 20 members of the group Gabriela managed to sneak in front of Aquino’s residence at Times Street at around 10:30 am to hold a short program.

In a statement, the group reminded Aquino of his promise to go after Arroyo and her minions.

“We take him to task on that promise and like the rest of the country, we expect no less from him,” said Joms Salvador, deputy secretary-general of Gabriela.

“If Aquino would be truthful to his promise of leading the people to ‘daang matuwid,’ [straight path] he should jail the culprit and free the innocents. He should work for Arroyo’s imprisonment and free women and all political prisoners,” Salvador added.

Salvador said there are 61 women out of 344 political prisoners under the Arroyo administration

“These women political prisoners suffered from the hands of their captors and many of them were sexually abused.”

“They are also in a most detrimental condition where they are continually made vulnerable to all forms of harassment, be these sexual, physical or emotional,” Salvador further stated.

Another group of protesters, leaders and members of the Philippine Airlines Employee’s Association, also staged a rally to seek Aquino’s intervention on the brewing labor dispute at the Philippine Airlines.

In a decision dated June 15, acting Labor Secretary Romeo Lagman found the planned mass lay off of some 30, 000 PAL employees’ “contracting out” to be lawful and based on a “valid exercise of management prerogative.”

The PAL union wants the incoming Labor Secretary to be given the right to study and decide on the issue “according to procedure and on a just basis.”

In a letter to Aquino, the union also asked for the cleansing of corrupt officials in the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE), and reform of the policy regarding contractualization.

In a statement after his meeting with Aquino Wednesday, Binay said he declined to accept “any Cabinet position so as not to burden the President and allow him to focus on the many challenges facing the nation.”

Aquino confirmed that he offered Binay government positions but the outgoing Makati Mayor “declined.”

“Several positions were offered but the VP declined assuring us however of his support,” Aquino said in a text message to INQUIRER.net.

Asked if the local government portfolio was among the posts offered, Aquino said: “No.”

Binay, who said he first conveyed his message to Aquino Monday evening, has publicly expressed his desire for the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) post.

But Binay assured Aquino of his “friendship and support and readiness to extend any assistance whenever needed.”

Talking to reporters after the meeting, Binay described the meeting as “social and cordial.”

Asked why the meeting lasted for more than an hour, Binay said: “E, basta’t social and cordial talagang mahaba ‘yan. Pagka hindi social maiksi lang (Since it’s a social and cordial meeting then expect it to be long. If it’s not social then it’s short),” Binay said.

The outgoing Makati mayor also refused to say who initiated the meeting.

“Hindi importante kung sino ang nag-propose. Basta’t kami ay nag-meeting. Ayos na ‘yon (It’s not important who proposed the meeting. We met. And that’s it),” he said.

Binay evaded all questions about the Cabinet issue.

Asked if they discussed during the meeting the Cabinet issue, Binay said: “No. We just had…”

Pressed further if he would accept other post in the Aquino administration if offered, the vice president-elect said “Siguro. Tingnan na lang natin sa mga susunod na araw (Maybe. Let’s see in the coming days).”

Binay’s camp had said that the DILG remained the “first and only choice” of the Vice President-elect.

But Aquino, in an earlier interview with reporters, said that while he respects Binay’s preference, “at the end of the day, it’s my Cabinet.”

“I’m responsible for how it performs,” Aquino said.

“And I think, I should be accorded the right to choose who I want to serve as my alter ego,” he said.

Santos, who will succeed popular two-term President Alvaro Uribe, defeated Green Party rival Antanas Mockus, a former Bogota mayor who drew 27.4 percent of the vote, the board added.

Albert Ho, a prominent lawmaker, had to be escorted by police from Victoria Park, where he had attended a forum on an electoral reform package that will be debated in Hong Kong’s Legislative Assembly on Wednesday.

Ho, who was unharmed, left in his car under a police escort. One officer was pushed to the ground during the chaotic scene, while a 19-year-old man was arrested for disorderly behavior and later released, police said.

“It was no big deal—just angry youths who expressed a lot of dissatisfaction and anger over my political position,” the veteran lawmaker told AFP after the incident.

“But this is a way for us to break the deadlock (on political reform) and move forward,” he added.

Ho had angered the youths by supporting a plan to raise the number of directly elected representatives in the legislative assembly, where half the number of seats are currently filled by Beijing-approved candidates.

The city’s government will unveil a reform plan on Monday, and it was reported Sunday that a compromise, approved by both Beijing and most of the assembly’s pro-democrats, had made likely its approval on Wednesday.

At present, only half of Hong Kong’s 60 legislative seats are directly elected by voters. The rest are picked by so-called “functional constituencies” which consist mostly of pro-Beijing professional elites.

The new plan, proposed by Ho’s Democratic Party, which has nine seats in the assembly, will allow a further five lawmakers to be directly elected to the functional constituency seats, according to the Sunday Morning Post.

Critics lambasted Tsang’s original plan because it stopped short of one-person, one-vote and proposed only an increase in the size of the assembly and the Beijing-appointed committee that chooses the city’s chief executive.

Democracy figurehead Martin Lee said the revised plan is a “huge improvement” on the government’s original blueprint, but warned that it did nothing to clarify how Hong Kong would achieve universal suffrage.

“This is a huge improvement on the government’s plan—there’s no doubt about that,” he told AFP. “But we must be careful and look to the future.”

Beijing has said that, at the earliest, universal suffrage can be ushered in for the election of Hong Kong’s chief executive in 2017 and the legislative assembly in 2020.

That timetable has been criticized by the pro-democracy camp in Hong Kong, which was returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 amid assurances from Beijing of broad autonomy for the territory.