The Salisbury Forum continues the fall 2010 season with a fascinating and timely subject, “The U.S. and China – A Question of Our Common Interests”. Orville Shell, Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society will speak on Friday, October 15th, 7:30 pm at the Katherine M. Elfers Hall, in the Esther Eastman Music Center at The Hotchkiss School. Schell, the former Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley for eleven years, has worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia and covered the war in Indochina.

The featured speaker is Maryam Elahi, Human Rights lawyer and Director of the International Women’s Program, Open Society Institute & Soros Foundations Network. Ms. Elahi is the chair of the International Human Rights Committee of the American Bar Association and has served on numerous boards including the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, the ACLU of CT and AI’s Policy Board. She has written and lectured on wide-range of human rights issues including women’s rights, U.S. and human rights foreign policy, “U.S. and the war on terror” and Middle East issues.

Peter Osnos, Founder of Public Affairs Books and Vice-Chairman of Columbia Journalism Review, draws on decades of experience as a correspondent, editor, publisher and entrepreneur to survey the ways the internet and mobile reading devices are influencing, for better and for worse, the information we receive.

Housatonic Valley Regional High School students show documentaries they created as part of a program with Global Village Media in a joint project with the The Connecticut Project for the Constitution, an organization dedicated to improving the quality of public dialogue on issues of constitutional importance.

“The Perfect President”, a dialogue between Professor Akhil Reed Amar of Yale Law School and Todd Brewster of ABC News.

Doris Meissner, former commissioner of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and Senior Fellow of the Migration Policy Institute will speak on “Immigration in America: What’s in Store?” at Housatonic Valley Regional High School.