ANN WRIGHT,
Reuters reports: “A small group of placard-waving pro-Palestinian
demonstrators gathered near U.S. President-elect Barack Obama’s vacation
retreat in Hawaii on Tuesday to protest against the Israeli airstrikes
in Gaza. … Obama has made no public comment on the strikes, which
Israel launched on Saturday.”

Wright is a former State Department diplomat and retired Army
colonel who is currently in Hawaii and was at those protests. She said
today: “The president-elect should put as a priority to press for a halt
to Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza, and of course for Hamas to
stop their rockets. When he was in Sderot in Israel several months ago,
Obama referred to how he would feel if rockets were coming to where his
daughters lived. What about the little girls in Gaza?”

Among her numerous assignments, Wright helped re-open the U.S.
embassy in Afghanistan in 2001. She resigned from the State Department
in protest of the Iraq invasion in March of 2003.

KATHY KELLY,
Kelly is co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence. The
group is organizing with other secular and faith-based groups “Camp
Hope: Countdown to Change” in Chicago, four blocks from Obama’s
residence there. The camp begins on New Year’s Day and continues to Dr.
Martin Luther King Day.

She said today: “Large lobbying groups, including some of the large
corporations, are pushing Obama around the clock to preserve the status
quo, wage war and provide for unbridled greed. What we’re asking is that
the money spent on the military be spent instead on soluble problems
such as lack of healthcare.”

Information about events, speakers and community forums is posted
at: http://camphope2009.org

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167