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More people than ever are searching for jobs internationally in the hope of gaining knowledge and experience from around the globe. In response to the economic upheavals of the last year, more Westerners are looking for employment in emerging markets, such as the Middle East, India, Eastern Europe and China. The benefits of international work experience can be huge, but you need to follow the right steps to find and land the right job. Here are five.

1. Research thoroughly. As in any job hunt, a serious research stage is very important. Take the time to explore the economic, political and cultural structure and stability of each place you want to consider moving to, as well as the effect your job abroad will have on your work-life balance and your career.

We remind our students that researching a foreign market is crucial. You absolutely must understand the region’s cultural nuances, employment laws and language requirements. For example, you shouldn’t move to China if working an 80- to 90-hour week isn’t something you’re willing to attempt. In the Middle East, you’ll work from Sunday through Thursday; your weekends will fall on Friday and Saturday instead of Saturday and Sunday. Your personal life will be different as well. If you move from New York to Rome, you should be prepared to find many stores closed on Sundays and Monday mornings.

Carefully researching the visas and work permits for each foreign country is also essential, and you should do it early, before you apply for any position. If you don’t already have a visa, your application may not even be considered. Many companies can offer you employment only if they can prove that there is no one suitable who already has a visa.

2. Use your networks. How do you find out everything you need to know? You can gather much of it from English-language newspapers for expatriates, such as the Bangkok Post in Thailand, and from the Internet and libraries, but getting advice from friends or family with first-hand experience in a region is invaluable. To get the most accurate picture of your potential fit, speak to other expatriates currently at jobs similar to the one you want. Use social networks to find introductions to professionals working in the area. Don’t underestimate the power of sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook.

Also don’t forget to check with your college or business school’s alumni network, which should be able to provide worldwide connections. Every student at London Business School is connected to more than 28,000 globally dispersed alumni and should find it easy to discover more about any area, job or organization. The 2011 MBA class alone represents 59 different nationalities.

3. Make sure your job application stands out. Once you decide what employers to pursue in your chosen country, prepare an application that will set itself apart. Look at the demand for the skills you possess in the particular market and the best way to make yourself look preferable to a potential recruiter. There is a remarkable consistency in the basic set of skills recruiters seek. Our work with hiring managers around the globe shows that they all want strong communicators who have analytical ability, can manage people well and show leadership potential. Be honest about your oral and written business language skills. Speaking to your grandmother in your local Italian dialect at an occasional Sunday dinner is not the same as working for years in Milan.

Be prepared for differences in the application process across the globe, especially regarding personal information. In France, your résuméwill be called a C.V. and will include your picture, date of birth, marital status and how many children you have. Your application will be infinitely more attractive if it bears a local address or a fixed date of arrival, if, say, you’re applying from Chicago for a job in Warsaw. Even if all you do to start is connect up with someone local to use their mobile phone number or home address, you’ll be more in line with local job candidates.

4. Prepare fully for your interview. After successfully securing an interview, do still more research to prevent surprises. In Japan your first interview may be a dinner with potential colleagues, so they can discover more about you and your family before getting down to business. In Great Britain you may be asked to participate in an assessment exercise involving role-playing, dealing with case studies and psychometric testing. Be sure to investigate what is acceptable in the culture. As an American, you may be used to flaunting your independent accomplishments; in Brazil, where teamwork and hierarchy are especially valued, that could make you appear self-centered or even disrespectful.

In any country, the initial interview may be conducted over the phone. Even if you’re not meeting the interviewer in person, dress for the interview anyway, stand up when you speak, so your voice is strong, and smile. Your confidence will need to come through without any visual cues. Be sure to demonstrate flexibility and the capacity to adapt to new environments.

5. Consider the practicalities. Finally, ensure that you are personally and psychologically ready for the move. Even if you’re going to a country where they speak the same language, you’ll encounter differences in everyday life that require flexibility, patience and a sense of humor. Don’t rush to judgment or make invidious comparisons about the new culture. Wherever you end up, relax and enjoy the different way of life.

Diane Morgan is the director of career services at London Business School. She leads a team of professionals at the school who impart to students and alumni both critical skills and career development expertise.

On one side of the road in Beijing, winds have been creating ripples in the Summer Palace lake for the past 250 years or so. On the other side, in a stately building surrounded by tall trees, waves are created by ideas, some of which look likely to sweep the entire country now. The building is the Central Party School (CPS) of the Communist Party of China (CPC), or the Party’s top institute for political studies.

On Sept 18, the CPC Central Committee decided to intensify and expand intra-Party democracy to “develop people’s democracy”, says Wu Hui, one of the young faculty members of and an associate professor in the CPS.

The CPC Central Committee said it would “ensure the democratic rights of its members” and strengthen intra-Party democracy at the grassroots level. It vowed to extensively absorb the will and views of all Party members, too, and bring their initiatives and creativity into full play.

In China, the term social organization covers not just NGOs, but companies and collectives, too. It refers to any organization that is more or less independent of the government. Talking to China Daily, Wu says such organizations are becoming an increasing part of civil society in China. Some researchers call them civil society organizations.

Social organizations, however, are a relatively new phenomenon in China. For about 40 years since the foundation of the People’s Republic, most Chinese, especially those living in urban areas, had been part of administratively assigned work units for life. The units took care of almost all their need, from income and housing to leisure activities and their children’s education. People hardly had any need for social networking beyond relatives.

The developments of the past two decades, however, have allowed more and more people to move from one part of the country to another for jobs and to shift from one employer to another. Many new non-political organizations, not led by government officials or CPC members, have mushroomed in the past two decades. And many old organizations no longer share the interests of their supervising agencies.

At first, millions of small (some of which are no longer small) companies emerged in the private sector. Since the mid-1990s, they have been joined by an increasing number of non-profit organizations, from charitable foundations to middle-class homeowners’ committees. For Chinese researchers, non-profit organizations either independent of or partly dependent on government funds are “social organizations” or “civil society organizations”. A conservative estimate puts their number in the country to about 3 million, with 400,000 registered with the Ministry of Civil Affairs. Some researchers, however, put the figure to as high as 8 million, Wu says.

Does the proliferation of such organizations indicate a political crisis? Does it suggest the threat of a “color revolution”, led by vested political interests thriving on overseas funds? Will it make, as some old guards fear, increasingly difficult for the CPC to call the shots in China? Or, is it a welcome change, as suggested by some intellectuals who regard it as a reflection of the growing assertiveness of the people when it comes to managing their own affairs?

“Wait a minute,” Wu says, “before we jump to any such conclusion, let us take off our tinted glasses to avoid seeing non-CPC organizations either as demons or as angels.” Their growth is a natural by-product of the economic reform - and there is a need for them.

It is impossible today to consider the government as the only source of protection for society, except during emergencies such as when there is shortage of basic necessities. The economic reform of the past 30 years has created diverse social interests, and the government has neither the need nor the reason to be involved in some of them.

The CPC should, as we recommend, is to work with social organizations and make them contribute to the CPC-led national program.

There are a few groups, of course, which seek to serve some external forces’ agenda, and it is not difficult to identify these politically motivated organizations.

There are also shady ones - from superstitious cults to financial crooks to criminal gangs. One most recent example is the case of some Chongqing officials who were exposed during a crackdown on organized crime for having a nexus with criminal gangs.

This is precisely why we need laws and regulations, and the CPC’s influence as society’s leading force to create a healthy environment for social organizations. “To some extent, China’s political reform is to be a process in which the government matches the change in its own functioning with the growth of social organizations,” Wu says.

That’s the reason why the CPC Central Committee included the concept of social organizations in its final paper in 2006, he says.

At the CPC’s 17th National Congress the next year, a general line was adopted to encourage social organizations to expand in a way that would encourage people to participate in various self-governing and self-managing processes as part of general social development. Strengthening inner-Party democracy down up to the grassroots level will make more Party members play an active role in various social organizations.

China has gained a lot of experience from experimental projects that have been going on at the local level. It has gained confidence, too, in dealing with social organizations in a selective way.

There are laws to ban groups causing harm to society, and to prevent organizations and their leaders from seeking ends beyond their stated goals. They may not be enough, but still there are policies to support do-gooders such as those helping the poor and spreading new farm techniques in rural areas.

There are also vague zones where CPC members are yet to be quite sure about their role. But it is here that they can be very helpful in implementing proper policies so that committed social organizations could continue to safeguard citizens’ rights, most importantly land use rights.

Land disputes are a main source of social disharmony in China. In the majority of cases, individual farmers fall prey to powerful business groups or individuals that are invited by local governments eager to raise their earnings.

Farm associations in China are not as strong as their counterparts in the US or Japan. Villagers’ associations are often bypassed in transfer of land use rights. Protests would not have been so widespread - and sometimes violent - if organized farmers had the legal right to represent their communities in land negotiations, Wu says.

In fact, the most crucial test of how the CPC can build a cooperative relationship with civil society organizations will be the way it works with rights’ groups. This is a challenge that remains.

But a cooperative relationship, or something of a working partnership, is going to be China’s goal. That is the ideal model. “We don’t want to have the ruling party to dominate all social organizations, as it was under the former Soviet model,” Wu says. “Unlike in some other developing countries or transitional societies we cannot let social organizations hold the government hostage, either Nor it is good to have a system in which there is continuous rivalry between the government and social organizations, which exchange roles but do not necessarily make good their promises.”

China’s job is to foster the best relationship between the government and social organizations as seen in “mature” democracies, where governments and social organizations share a basic political framework, with the latter raising new demands and generating new ideas to help make the former make due policy adjustments.

“That is the model of a harmonious society,” he said.

Zambia’s Luanshya district, a famous mine area in its Copperbelt province, has been forced to ban weddings, former miners re-engagement program and other social gatherings as a way of thwarting the spread of the A/H1N1 flu, the Times of Zambia reported on Saturday.

Luanshya has recorded more than 630 suspected A/H1N1 flu cases, the country’s most over the past four days, the report said.

Luanshya District Commissioner (DC) George Kapu told the newspaper that 33 out of the 64 patients were discharged on Thursday from the flu treatment center based at the Luanshya Mine Clinic in New Town.

He said following the advice from health authorities, weddings and all public gatherings in the flu-like disease affected townships have been banned with immediate effect.

The Luanshya Copper Mine (LCM) and Luanshya District administration authorities have temporarily suspended the ex-miners re-engagement program as a measure aimed at averting the further spreading of the suspected A/H1N1 flu.

The new owner of the LCM, China Non Ferrous Metal Company (CNMC), confirmed to Xinhua the development in the company.

The public relations officer of LCM, Sydney Chileya, said the decision to temporarily suspend the miners’ re-engagement program, which will bring together ex-miners on large scale, was based on health authorities’ advice after the outbreak of flu like disease in the mining town.

The district commissioner of Ndola, the provincial capital of Copperbelt, Moses Mumba, said 38 patients out of the 107 pupils remained quarantined at the Ndola Girls National Technical High School.

He expressed hope the disease would be suppressed by the proactive eradication campaign of the health personnel camped at the school on the outskirts of Ndola. The ban on the visit by parents to pupils at the school was still in effect, Times said.

Earlier, the Zambian government told their citizens to be on alert as the number of suspected cases in the country was on the rise.

Senior official from the Health Ministry has said their national action plan on A/H1N1 flu requires about 2.13 million U.S. dollars for more drugs and logistics against the pandemic.

Zambia’s acting minister of health Brian Chituwo told the Parliament earlier this week in a statement on the update on the A/H1N1 flu that half of the amount required had been mobilized from the government and its partners.

He said pediatric formulations of the drugs already acquired through the WHO and the World Bank will soon be available, adding that a request has been made to secure more to beef up present stocks.

He said a number of preventive measures have been put in place, while stressing there is no need for panic among Zambians as the A/H1N1 flu is not as lethal as it was earlier reported..

The minister also disclosed that the government has no intentions to close schools that have recorded such cases because the disease is not as dangerous as earlier reported.

Zambia reported its first confirmed case on July 28. Various measures have been taken to curb the spreading of the disease. No death from the disease has been reported in the country.

Scientists at Brown University and other research institutions announced Thursday that they have found evidence of water molecules on the surface of the moon. The findings will be published Friday in journal Science.

The molecules and hydroxyl — a molecule consisting of one oxygen atom and one hydrogen atom — were discovered across the entire surface of earth’s nearest celestial neighbor. While the abundances are not precisely known, as much as 1,000 water molecule parts-per-million could be in the lunar soil: harvesting one ton of the top layer of the moon’s surface would yield as much as 32 ounces of water, according to scientists involved in the discovery.

Carle Pieters, a planetary geologist at Brown, is the lead author of one paper this week in Science that reports evidence of water in the moon’s high latitudes — greatly expanding current thinking about where water in any form was presumed to be located.

“We’ve made a very important step with this discovery, and now there are some very important steps to follow up on,” Pieters said.

Professor of Geological Sciences Pieters is the lead investigator on the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), a NASA instrument that was carried into space on Oct. 22, 2008, aboard the Indian Space Research Organization’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. She said the findings from M3 reveal interesting, new questions about where the water molecules come from and where they may be going. Scientists have speculated that water molecules may migrate from non-polar regions of the moon to the poles, where they are stored as ice in ultra-frigid pockets of craters that never receive sunlight.

“If the water molecules are as mobile as we think they are — even a fraction of them — they provide a mechanism for getting water to those permanently shadowed craters,” Pieters said.

The M3 team found water molecules and hydroxyl at diverse areas of the sunlit region of the moon’s surface, but the water signature appeared stronger at the moon’s higher latitudes.

From its perch in lunar orbit, M3’s state-of-the-art spectrometer measured light reflecting off the moon’s surface at infrared wavelengths, splitting the spectral colors of the lunar surface into small enough bits to reveal a new level of detail in surface composition. When the M3 science team analyzed data from the instrument, they found the wavelengths of light being absorbed were consistent with the absorption patterns for water molecules and hydroxyl.

“For silicate bodies, such features are typically attributed to water and hydroxyl-bearing materials,” Pieters said. “When we say ‘water on the moon,’ we are not talking about lakes, oceans or even puddles. Water on the moon means molecules of water and hydroxyl that interact with molecules of rock and dust specifically in the top millimeters of the moon’s surface.”

The M3 discovery was confirmed by data from two NASA spacecrafts — the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS)on the Cassini spacecraft and the High-Resolution Infrared Imaging Spectrometer on the EPOXI spacecraft. Data from those missions also are being published in separate papers in Science.

It’s good to see that unlike some other tabloid darlings—I’m looking at you, Paris and Lindsay—Julia still takes care of her so-hot-in-2004 fashion accessory, the mini dog. In fact, this diminuitive arm candy named Sonia has become like a sister, and Julia sees to it that Sonia is always dressed to the nines with the latest trends. “I can’t walk past a pet shop that sells clothes and not buy her something,” Julia explains. Her fashion knowledge extends beyond the canine, however. As a makeup artist and model, Julia has hands-on experience with the human realms of style. Whether dancing to a set by her boyfriend DJ Keza at a club party or just having dinner among friends, her outfit must embody pure fashion perfection. “From early morning, I’m starting to think about what kind of hairstyle I want to get done for the night and which combination of clothes, shoes and purse I will wear.” Julia is a self-confessed shoe junkie and admits that a new pair of pumps always puts a smile on her face. “It’s actually a very weak side of me … I simply can’t ever get enough.” The fierce yellow pair she is wearing here comes from Italian designer Stella Luna at Shin Kong Place, and she also frequents Guess at the The Place and Steve Madden at The Village. When this Russian style queen isn’t absorbed in a fashion shoot, you can find her primping for a night on the town, her living accessory perched like a princess atop a mountain of designer shoes.

Name: Julia Virva

Occupation: Makeup Artist/Model

Nationality: Russian

Fashionista: MeiLi Autumn

For more style analysis or fashion insight, visit MeiLi’s website, www.MeiLiAutumn.com

Nepali Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal is heading to the United States on Sunday evening to participate in the 64th General Assembly of the United Nations (UN) that kicked off on Sept. 15 in New York.

Nepal will meet U.S. President Barak Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and other heads of the state.

He will present a piece of rock brought from Mt. Everest (Qomolangma) as momento to Obama to underscore the impact of global warming on the Himalayas.

Addressing a function in the capital Kathmandu on Saturday, the prime minister said, “I’ll raise concerns about climate change and Nepal’s efforts to maintain international peace, besides other issues of international concern.”

On Sept. 22, the Secretary-General will convene the largest-ever gathering of heads of the state on climate change to mobilize political momentum to ensure a successful conclusion to the negotiations on a new pact to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Copenhagen in December.

Militants gunned down two Special Police Officers (SPOs) and wounded another one in an ambush in India-controlled Kashmir, Police said Saturday said.

The attack was carried out by the militants in Shikri Top-Marmat area of Doda district, 200 kilometers northeast of the winter capital of India-controlled Kashmir Jammu on Friday.

“Three SPOs were intercepted by a group of heavily armed militants in hilly Marmat area of Doda around 17:30 p.m. on Friday. The militants fired upon these men without giving them any chance to take positions or retaliate back. Two SPOs were killed on spot while third one suffered injures and took cover in a field.” Said a senior police officer posted in Doda.

The militants are believed to have decamped with the two service rifles and mobile phones of the slain SPOs.

Following the incident, police parties and paramilitary troopers rushed to the area to lookout for the militants.

The search operation in the area is going on, police said.

In the past three months militants were reported to have suffered many casualties in this area during gunfights with the police and Indian army.

The gun fighting between militants and Indian army troopers in India-controlled Kashmir takes place intermittently.

Police and defense officials maintain that most of the times the operations triggering gun fights are carried out on prior information about presence of militants in specific areas.

Local governments around China have been busy setting up large-scale development zones, in which land use rights are transferred to users at very low price to attract investment since the 1990s. If taking infrastructure and land expropriation expenditure into cost, most land transferred for industrial use was making losses while the authorities can only make money from land for commercial and residential projects. Therefore, it is inappropriate to arbitrarily accuse local governments of mobilizing “land revenue” when they expropriate land at low prices, and then transfer them at a higher price, for making high profit.

The different features of the manufacturing industry and service industry should be blamed for the price gap between land for industrial use and those for commercial and residential projects. Manufacturers always give priority to seeking best locations for factories on cheap but easily-accessible land, with low environmental and labor protection standards so that their products can be easily distributed through modern logistics. The service industry and real estate sector, however, are usually confined to certain areas as they mainly provide services to local residents.

As a result, all the local authorities are trying on the one hand to lower their industrial-use land price as a preferential measure to attract more outside investment. On the other hand, they snatch extortionate profit through limiting land supply for commercial and residential buildings, as the governments at different levels enjoy monopoly in local land transactions.

The prerequisite for the construction boom of industrial development zones from coastal developed areas to inland provinces, in disregard of the macro-control efforts of the central government, is that the local governments can expropriate land from local farmers at relatively low prices.

The low investment cost of manufacturing industry in competing development zones, coming at the expense of environmental protection, reasonable compensation of land expropriation and labor security, had brought excessive investment which led to surplus production capacity. Most products are highly dependent on overseas markets. With a favorable trade balance, the steady Renminbi appreciation would stimulate more hot money into the commercial property market, resulting in soaring housing prices.

There are two important changes taken place in the late 1990s, which contributed to the aforesaid phenomenon. First, during the process of corporation reform, many State-owned and township enterprises were transformed into private firms or joint ventures. Unlike their previous role as enterprise owners, the local governments became tax collectors of enterprises. Without any power to fix tax rates, the local governments tried every method to attract investment in order to increase local fiscal revenue, which in turn lead to cutthroat competition between different development zones.

The second change happened during the evolution of the relationship between the central and local authorities. After the tax-sharing reform of 1994, central finance takes 75 percent of the value-added tax of the manufacturing industry and leaves the other 25 percent to local governments. In the light of the new taxation system, the local governments are under pressure to establish more development zones in a bid to boost economic development and expand tax sources.

Without a flourishing manufacturing sector, there will be no room for the healthy development of service, business and property industries. Therefore, introducing more manufacturing industry can not only bring value-added tax and boost local service industry, but also bring sales tax and more revenue on commercial and residential land leasing.

To sum up, this unsustainable development pattern could increase the government revenue swiftly in the short term, but it will cause economic imbalance in the long run and do harm to the whole economy when overseas demand fluctuates. Various measures at multiple levels should be adopted to change the development model, of which the most crucial step is to reform the land expropriation system.

A mechanism of direct negotiation between land users and farmers should be employed in the land expropriation system reform to give farmers more voice in disposing their arable land. A rising land-use cost for manufacturing sector can constrain excessive investment as well as blind expansion of development zones. The local government can impose land value-added tax to make up their losses in land-use right leasing fees.

The reform is an essential step, which not only involves how to protect farmers’ property rights but also concerns the issue of re-adjusting the national economic growth pattern. Generally speaking, the current financial system and the relation evolution of local governments and enterprises should be blamed for the current development pattern. It would be better for further reforms if local governments can be given more fiscal stimulus, including land value-added tax and property tax.

The author is an associate research fellow of the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data revealed on Monday a surge in popularity of mobile wireless internet use across the nation.

Since December last year there has been a 51 percent increase in subscribers to mobile wireless, the service that allows customers to access the net at places away from their home such as coffee shops and airport lounges.

A highly competitive market has seen mobile wireless subscriptions spike from 1.3 million in December 2008 to 2 million in June this year. They now account for 27 percent of all non-dialup subscriptions, up from 20 percent six months ago.

The ABS figures on mobile wireless do not yet take into account connections via mobile phones.

Overall there were 8.4 million active internet subscribers in Australia at the end of June, with dial-up connections falling rapidly.

The trend towards higher download speeds continued, with 57 percent of subscribers now using a download speed of 1.5 Mbps or greater, compared with 51 percent in December 2008.

Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva admitted on Saturday the odds of invoking the Internal Security Act again to deal with the planned mass rally by anti-government red-shirts on September 19, Thai media reported

According to Bangkok Post online, Abhisit discussed the issue with acting police chief Pol Gen Thani Somboosap at a cafe in a gasoline station in Maharaj district of Ayutthaya province, while he was on his way back to Bangkok from visiting Lopburi province.

The red-shirts, or the United Front of Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD), scheduled to hold a anti-government rally next Saturday (September 19), the three-year anniversary of the military coup that ousted the then Prime Minister Thaksin shinawatra.

The Prime Minister made the stance after his motorcade confronted protests and was pelted with bags of fermented fish, water bottles and sandals when he was visiting Lopburi this morning.

About 200 red-shirts in Lopburi rallied against Abhisit who visited the central province to record his Confidence in Thailand with PM Abhisit weekly program on NBT Channel.

The imposing of Internal Security Act was on the table again, after the government invoked the Act from August 29 to September 1to handle the red-shirts’ protest, which was initially scheduled for August 30 to press Abhisit to dissolve the House and to call new election.

In the wake of the mobilization of police and army troops by the government, however, the pro-Thaksin group on August 29 announced to postpone it to September 5, citing the reason of the unnecessary fuss by the government. Days later, they re-postponed the rally to 19th.