London, England (CNN) -- Recently named London's "It Girl" by society magazine Vanity Fair, 18-year-old Jazzy de Lisser is said to have it all. She is beautiful and affluent, her best friends include Sting's daughter, Coco Sumner, and she is often compared to another famous British trend-setter, Kate Moss.

Yet underneath the glitz and glamour of a privileged lifestyle, de Lisser has fought a lifelong battle with what is termed the "silent killer" -- Hepatitis C -- an infectious blood-borne virus that attacks and scars the liver.

The virus is usually passed on through sexual contact or drug use, but in de Lisser's case, she got it from her mother, at birth.

At the age of three, blood tests revealed that de Lisser's mother -- fashion designer Serena Bute -- had unknowingly passed on the deadly disease to her daughter.

Bute revealed that at the same time, she also discovered her own infection with Hepatitis C and that her dabbling in multi-strand necklaces  drugs and needle-sharing in the 70s had most likely been the cause.

Bute was unaware of her own disease for so long because Hepatitis C is generally asymptomatic, or "silent," until liver scarring has reached such an extreme level that it can lead to liver failure and even liver cancer.

"When I was 13 years old, doctors told me my liver was already in worse shape than that of a middle-aged alcoholic," de Lisser told CNN.

If her liver ever stops functioning, de Lisser's only option may be to undergo a liver transplant. But even then, the virus is likely to attack the new liver.

De Lisser is hoping never to get to that stage. Since the age of six, the teenager has undergone a series of pearl jewelry wholesale  very painful and as-yet unsuccessful treatments in the hope of getting rid of the disease.

Yet for de Lisser, the biggest battle has not been with the illness that affects every aspect of her life, but with the stereotypes that come with any sexually-transmitted or drug-related disease.

"It's a disease that's very hard to relate to and it's embarrassing," de Lisser told CNN. "If someone told me about having Hepatitis C and I didn't know much about it, I would be freaked out as well," she continued.

"I'm always scared of how people, boys, will react. How do I tell someone?" she said.

After keeping her secret under wraps for over a decade, de Lisser recently decided not only to tell her story, but also to become a strong advocate for the cause against liver disease by releasing an award-winning video diary and raising impressive funds for her own charity, Liver Good Life.

The documentary diary follows de Lisser through the ages of 15 and 16, as she attempts a new treatment which has a 40 percent success rate of eliminating the disease, according to leading liver specialist Professor Mieli-Vergani.

The diary shows de Lisser begging for the pain to stop as she receives her weekly injections and her mother fighting back the tears as she addresses her feelings of guilt.

De Lisser invites the cameras into her home, where the side-effects of the powerful drugs -- Ribavirin to prevent the virus multiplying, and Interferon to boost her immune system -- become apparent. The teenager loses almost three quarters of her hair, switches from raging moods to akoya pearl bracelet  lethargic states and her mouth is full of ulcers.

In the last few scenes of the film, the viewer shares de Lisser's intense relief as she is told the virus has gone, and then, her pain as she learns it has returned.

"When it was cleared for a while, Jazzy was so incredibly happy," Bute told CNN. "We knew it was a possibility, but we really never thought it would come back."

The treatment left de Lisser's body "severely battered by the side-effects," and she was ordered to recover for a year and a half.

"I wouldn't try this treatment again," de Lisser told CNN. "I want a new treatment to be invented, much more powerful."

Read more about Hepatitis C

To fund the research into a new treatment, Jazzy last year launched Liver Good Life, her charity that has already raised £300,000 ($496,300) of the £1.9 million ($3.1 million) it would cost to build a research lab at London's prestigious King's College Hospital.

The charity also creates short animation clips explaining liver disease that de Lisser hopes will be featured in sex education classes in schools across the UK.

Aside from her charitable endeavors, de Lisser is taking a gap year to travel and enjoy life like many other young adults. "I don't want this to define me," she said. "But it's hard; I can't ever drink alcohol, I ingest dozens of homeopathic pills daily and often feel tired and sick."

The only time de Lisser appears less comfortable talking about her disease is when the subject of sex and children is brought up. "It's not an easy topic. I'm still unsure how to deal with this. When do I tell a boy? It's so personal," she explains.

But de Lisser remains optimistic: "When it comes to having children, I don't even think of the possibility of passing it on to them. I know I will get rid of it. It has always been my goal to be free of Hepatitis C before I reach 21. I just have to believe it."

Beijing, China (CNN) -- Prominent Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, who was arrested in 1989 for his role in the Tiananmen Square protest, has been sentenced to 11 years in prison for his role in a separate subversion case, his lawyer said Friday.

Attorney Shang Baojun said that Liu's political rights would be suspended for two years under the sentence. Shang said he was disappointed with the verdict and felt the sentence was harsher than he had expected.

As for an appeal, Shang said he had not yet discussed the idea with his client.

Liu's wife, Liu Xia, said she attended the court session Friday and saw her husband for the first time since March. She told akoya pearl necklace  CNN Wednesday that police prevented her from leaving their home during the one-day trial.

Riding in a police vehicle as she spoke, Liu Xia said it was "inconvenient" to make further comments.

Liu Xiaobo, a former university lecturer and literary critic, faced a possible 15-year jail sentence, amid growing international outrage over his year-long detention, according to media reports.

Liu, 53, was detained on December 8, 2008, and held under "residential surveillance" as police investigated the case, according to the PEN American Center, a U.S. literary and human rights organization. On June 23 of this year, he was arrested and charged with jewelry boxes  inciting subversion of state power, the organization said. Liu is on the PEN board of directors.

The case was turned over to the prosecutor's office December 8 -- one year from the time Liu was detained.

Liu co-authored Charter 08, "a declaration calling for political reform, greater human rights, and an end to one-party rule in China that has been signed by hundreds of individuals from all walks of life throughout the country," PEN says on its Web site. The group said Liu was arrested before the formal release of Charter 08.

"Liu has been engaged in agitation activities, such as spreading of rumors and defaming of the government, aimed at subversion of the state and overthrowing the socialism system in recent years," according to a police statement reported by China's state-run Xinhua news agency.

The statement claimed Liu confessed to the  cultured pearl jewelry  charge during a preliminary police investigation.

Liu served as an adviser to student leaders during the demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in 1989. Along with three other intellectuals, he took part in hunger strikes there on June 2 of that year prior to the crackdown to show support for the flagging student protests.

He was arrested two days after the Tiananmen crackdown and was released in 1991. In May 1995 he was detained again for collecting signatures for a petition calling for human rights guarantees.

The U.S. government called for Liu's release.

"The United States was deeply concerned to learn that ... Liu ... was found guilty of 'incitement to subvert state power,'" said Mark Toner, an acting State Department spokesman. "We call on the Government of China to release him immediately and to respect the rights of all Chinese citizens to peacefully express their political views."

(CNN) -- A woman jumped a barrier at the start of Christmas Eve Mass at St. Peter's Basilica and knocked down the pope, briefly disrupting ceremonies.

Screams erupted from onlooking worshippers when the woman ran toward Pope Benedict XVI and grabbed onto his vestments as he walked down the main aisle of the church, video footage showed.

He was quickly helped to his feet by his aides -- prompting cheers from the crowd -- and the service was resumed, Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi told CNN.

The woman was removed by Vatican guards, Lombardi said.

John Allen, senior Vatican analyst for  freshwater pearl bracelets  CNN, said such security breaches aren't uncommon.

"As compared to say, the president of the United States, the security membrane around the pope is pretty thin and fairly permeable," he said, citing similar past incidents, including one that happened last Christmas Eve.

Allen said that generally, these disruptions are caused by people who aren't seeking real harm, but who want to be close to the pope.

Benedict began what has traditionally been a midnight Mass at the Vatican at 10 p.m. as officials sought to gemstone jewelry   keep the 82-year-old pontiff from a late night.

Celebrants in Bethlehem, the traditional birthplace of Jesus in the West Bank, however, joined the Latin Patriarch Fouad Twal for a midnight Mass attended by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and other Palestinian officials.

Outside the Church of the Nativity, erected over the site Christian tradition says was the place of Jesus' birth, the faithful gathered  cultured pearl jewelry  under the watchful eyes of heavily armed Palestinian police.

But Palestinian shopkeeper Nadia Hazboun said the security situation in the West Bank has improved in the time since the militant Hamas group took over Gaza and Abbas' Fatah movement abandoned the narrow strip of land between Israel and the Mediterranean for the West Bank.

"It was bad, now it is good," he told Voice of America radio. "I told you, before anybody take the law in his [own] hands. But now the law [is] with the police. We have security, we have calm, we have now the best situation in Bethlehem."Were you there? Share pictures, video

Christmas Eve in Bethlehem is a popular destination for American Christians, including Iowan Paul Edelman.

"Just the festivities, the idea that this is the birthplace of Christ, and you get to see all the historic places and share it with people from around the world; it's a very nice experience," he told Voice of America radio.

Beijing, China (CNN) -- A handful of homegrown micro-blogging sites emerged about the same time Twitter started to gain a small, yet steadily growing, share of Chinese Internet users, beginning about 2007, around a year after Twitter was launched in the U.S. in 2006.

While almost all of the early Chinese micro-blogging pioneers faced the same fate as Twitter, most of the sites are now back online and are fiercely competing to gain a share of what many predict will soon be an exploding population of Chinese micro-bloggers.

Alex Mou is the founder of one of them. He started a Twitter-like site called Zuosa, which was shut down for "self maintenance" on July 21, around two months after Twitter was first blocked in early June.

"We were closed for self maintenance for a couple of days," Mou said. "Others were indefinitely closed. We had some inappropriate messages that we needed to delete, and then it was OK."

Since Zuosa has been back online, Mou has been working hard to cultivate a community that seems to be willing to blog about everything except subject matter that might offend the Chinese government.

"You have to watch yourself," Mou said. "You have to do some monitoring, filtering and stuff." Some observers say the self-censorship that micro-blogs in China inevitably must follow in order to survive will deter the country's 300 million Internet users from using them.

"Because of the situation we are in right now, for real micro-blogging to become popular in China, it is very difficult," said Xue Ying, co-founder of BloggerInsight, a blogging community that provides research on China's high tech industries.

"They are trying to control the content. That is the very opposite of the philosophy of micro-blogging."

Yet those who run China's Twitter clones disagree, arguing their sites employ features that will attract Chinese Internet users already accustomed to socializing and sharing information on the Web.

More than 90 percent of Chinese broadband users use social media, compared to 76 percent in the United States, according to a study from San Francisco-based Netpop Research. Zuosa, as well as other Chinese micro blogs, like Digu and Sina Microblog, a site launched by web portal Sina.com, allow users to upload pictures and embed videos to go with their 140-character limit posts. In contrast, only text can be posted directly onto Twitter.

Some of the services interface with Twitter as well, allowing members to update their Chinese Twitter and the real one simultaneously.

Chinese sites can also be seamlessly updated through many of the country's popular chat services, enabling them to inflatable water games   become a natural extension of the instant messaging culture that permeates the web here.

"They are working to use popular Chinese services and integrate them into micro blogging," said Lu Gang, co-founder of OpenWeb.Asia, a workgroup focusing on the Asian Internet industry.

Some chat providers are even starting their own micro-blogs. Tencent Holdings, which owns QQ, the most popular Chinese instant messaging platform, recently launched a Twitter-like service called TaoTao.

Microsoft was beta testing MSN Juku, a micro-blog service linked with Windows Live Messenger. However the project was recently "suspended indefinitely" after Plurk, a popular social networking site in Taiwan, Indonesia and the Philippines, claimed Microsoft copied its code. Microsoft investigated and has now acknowledged a third party vendor had copied some code  pearl jewelry sets  . The software giant says it takes full responsibility and is discussing the matter with Plurk.

"If you look at how the Chinese use the Internet, instant messaging is huge," Thomas Crampton, Asia-Pacific director of 360 Digital Influence, a blog of the Ogilvy Public Relations firm, said.

"Twittering is sort of a more social version of that, so I think it is well within the [Chinese] social media ecosystem."

Mobile phones are another important component of China's burgeoning micro-blog ecosystem, especially as 3G smart phones permeate the market after the government rolled out the service at the beginning of 2009. Similar to people in the West, Chinese can send tweets to micro-blog sites via text messages, another one of the most popular forms of communication in the country.

Yet as network speeds get faster, companies are positioning themselves to take advantage of micro-blogging via the mobile web.

"Our goal is to build a new generation messaging platform for mobiles," Jeff Tao, founder of Hesine Technologies Inc., a Beijing-based company that has developed an interface allowing mobile  multi-strand necklaces  users to interact with multiple micro-blogs at once.

"I can bundle a phone with 15 social network sites so the same blog can be posted to 15 sites with just one single click," Tao said.

"It will have a big impact on the mobile community."

According to Tao, the free software has been downloaded on 200,000 phones since it was launched a few months ago.

"Free" is a feature Chinese micro-blogs are trying to move away from, and many are exploring ways to turn growing communities into revenue streams.

Zuosa is earning money from users willing to pay to receive posts via text messages written by Master Xue Cheng, one of China's more famous Buddhist monks.

"His followers are our first paying users," Mou said. "Although it is very new we can see that some people are willing to pay to receive important information."

MySpace China is also studying how to incorporate celebrities to coax users into paying for its 9911 micro-blog service, said its CEO Tony Wei.

"We haven't decided yet," Wei told CNN. "It will depend on our negotiations with the agents of the celebrities."

9911 has a partnership with Youku.com, China's version of video-sharing Web site YouTube, allowing users to easily post film clips from the site, Wei said. Members can record audio files via mobile phone and post them as well.

"It is very special," Wei said.

While some say attempts to commercialize China's Twitter-copycats are rendering them as portals filled with nothing but entertainment fluff, those who use the sites see it differently.

"I find it interesting," Jeremy Goldkorn, a Beijing-based blogger who "tweets" in Chinese on infotainment portal Sina.com's micro-blog site said.

"There is a real exchange of ideas going on. There is stuff that exists at the margins of what is acceptable in China."

Yet for those who wish to micro-message outside the margins, there is still Twitter in China.

Despite government efforts to block the site, the country's so-called "Great Firewall" is leaky enough to allow Chinese tweeters to use Twitter itself versus a micro-blog alternative.

"It is a risk of course," said Michael Anti, a Chinese Twitter user who has more than 10,000 followers on the site. "But still people do it. The Twitter community is booming and is expanding. It is fantastic."

(CNN) -- Iran could see widespread protests this weekend, as a day of mourning for the most prominent cleric to oppose the regime coincides with the major Shiite holy day of Ashura.

Iran -- whose regime exists as an explicitly Shiite Muslim leadership -- may find it politically and culturally difficult to put a lid on the marking of Ashura this year.

It falls on Sunday -- which happens to be a week to the day since the death of Grand Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, a key pearl beads   figure in the 1979 Iranian revolution. Montazeri, who went on to become one of the government's most vocal critics, died December 20.

The seventh day after a death is a traditional time for mourning in Islam, giving Iran's opposition two reasons to demonstrate on Sunday, both with impeccable religious justification.

But what exactly is Ashura and why does it draw such passionate crowds, some of whom beat themselves until they bleed?

The holy day commemorates the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, who died in 680 fighting to lead the religion based  cheap pearl jewelry  on the teachings of his grandfather, the Prophet Mohammed. The battle is one of the defining points in the split between the two main branches of Islam, the majority Sunnis and the minority Shiites.

Hussein was badly outnumbered when he was killed fighting Yazeed near the city of Karbala, in modern-day Iraq.

Shiites commemorate the death of Hussein each year, climaxing on Ashura -- the 10th day of the month of Muharram -- after a 40-day mourning period.

While Shiites are a minority among Muslims worldwide, they are the majority in Iraq and Iran, where the day sees tens or even hundreds of thousands of faithful out on the streets.

Some of the most dramatic scenes take place in Karbala itself, as Shiites congregate to do symbolic penance for failing to come to akoya pearl necklace  Hussein's aid in his uprising against Yazeed.

Believers chant, beat their breasts, cut themselves with daggers or swords and whip themselves in synchronized moves.

In Iraq under Saddam Hussein, the marking of Ashura was banned for 30 years. (The former dictator was a Sunni.) The first public Ashura demonstrations in Karbala after his fall, in 2004, came under attack by Sunni militants.