In October, an Italian appeals court overturned the young Seattle woman’s murder conviction in the 2007 death of her British roommate in Perugia. But the same court upheld Knox’s conviction for slander — for falsely accusing bar owner Diya “Patrick” Lumumba of involvement in the slaying.

Lumumba was freed after two weeks in prison for lack of evidence.

Knox later said she was “manipulated” during her lengthy police interrogation.

An appeal of the slander conviction was filed Monday, Knox family spokesman Dave Marriott confirmed. He doesn’t know when the Italian court might consider it.

Knox returned to Seattle after her murder conviction was overturned. The former exchange student had been in custody since 2007.

In its ruling last fall, the Italian appeals court also acquitted Knox’s then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, in the murder of Meredith Kercher.

A third defendant, Ivory Coast-born drifter Rudy Guede, was convicted in a separate trial of sexually assaulting and stabbing Kercher. His 16-year prison sentence — reduced on appeal from an initial 30 years — was upheld by Italy’s highest court in 2010.

In a lengthy court document explaining the ruling that cleared Knox and Sollecito, presiding appeals court Judge Claudio Pratillo Hellmann wrote that Knox implicated Lumumba after hours of intense police questioning because “she was convinced that was what the police wanted her to do; to name a guilty person.”

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“Yes, it’s true. I am in love with captain (Francesco) Schettino,” Domnica Cemortan, who has joint Moldovan and Romanian citizenship, was quoted by La Stampa daily as saying to investigators looking into the January 13 tragedy.

The 52-year-old captain is married and has a daughter. Cemortan in earlier interviews had dismissed gossip that she was Schettino’s lover saying he was a faithful family man because he had shown her pictures of his daughter.

The woman was also quoted as saying that she was on the bridge when the luxury liner hit rocks off the Tuscan island of Giglio on January 13, which caused it to keel over with a loss of 32 lives out of 4,229 people on board.

In an interview with AFP earlier, however, she said that she had been dining with friends when the accident happened. Schettino had told investigators that there was no-one apart from authorised staff on the bridge at the time.

Italian newspapers say that the testimony of the mysterious Moldovan — a former employee of cruise ship operator Costa Crociere — has become a key part of the investigation that is trying to work out who was where when.

Cemortan in earlier interviews in the Moldovan capital Chisinau said Schettino was “a hero” whose actions after the impact saved thousands of lives and she dismissed the accusations against him as “absurd”.

The captain, who is under house arrest at his home on the Amalfi coast, and first officer Ciro Ambrosio are accused of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning the ship before all the passengers were evacuated.

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The line, which is due to be completed by 2023, would allow high-speed trains to link Paris and Turin in just over four hours, compared to seven at present.

The Lyon to Turin connection would be cut back from just over four to just under two.

Work will begin with the digging of a 57-kilometre tunnel (35 mile) tunnel under the Alps to link the border areas.

The €8.5 billion ($11.2 billion) tunnel will funded by France, Italy, and the European Union, with Italian Deputy Transport Minister Mario Ciaccia saying he hoped the EU would pay 40 percent of the cost.

The new line will take account of human and environmental impact studies on the Italian side of the border where violent protests took place last year, French Transport Minister Thierry Mariani said.

Last week some 40 people were arrested, with 26 of them detained, following violent protests in July over the project.

“A minority cannot upset a shared decision, along with a national and EU programme,” Ciaccia said, vowing to stand by the agreed timetable for building the link.

Early work to clear the way for the line started last summer in Italy’s northern Susa Valley amid a strong police presence as protesters sought to break through barriers erected around the controversial site.

Susa Valley residents fiercely opposed the plan, saying construction of tunnels would damage the environment.

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The Costa Concordia, carrying 4,200 passengers, capsized after hitting rocks off the coast of Isola del Giglio last Friday night. Eleven bodies have been recovered, and a search for 24 missing people is underway.

Marco Monda said he was spending a honeymoon with his young wife and they were invited to dinner at the best restaurant on the ship. Schettino, he said, appeared at the same restaurant some 15 minutes later after they sat at their table at 9:00 p.m.

“The captain made his way between tables embracing two women – a blonde and a brunette. He was showing them beautiful view that opened from the restaurant,” Monda said adding that Shettino was still there and not on the captain’s bridge, when the ship crashed into rocks at approximately 9:45 p.m.

“The captain was among us at the moment of the impact and I am ready to write it down in black on the white, as because of this damn captain I saw the face of the death,” the Italian passenger said.

He also said that the captain was first to flee the vessel like a regular passenger leaving other people behind.

“He left elderly and handicapped to the mercy of fate. Crew members were helping us, but there were no officers among them,” Monda added.

Captain Schettino, 52, who is currently under a house arrest, claimed that the ship hit a rock formation that had not appeared on nautical charts and had not been picked up by the ship’s navigation systems.

According to prosecutors, Schettino was to blame for the crash and also fled the vessel when passengers were still stranded – a version apparently backed by a recorded conversation between Schettino and a port official. But the captain has flatly rejected the accusations.

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Five days after the 114,500 tonne cruise ship struck a rock and capsized off the Tuscan island of Giglio, hopes of finding anyone alive have all but disappeared and salvage experts are preparing to pump 2,300 tonnes of fuel from the hulk.

The ship’s captain, Francesco Schettino, blamed for causing the accident by coming too close to shore and then abandoning the vessel before the evacuation was complete, was put under house arrest on Tuesday after being questioned by a judge.

The search continued overnight on sections above the water line but and until the order was given to suspend work, divers had been preparing to resume the difficult and dangerous search of partly submerged areas of the giant ship.

“The visibility is awful. Yesterday I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face,” said Giuseppe Minciotti, director of a school for cave divers in the northern city of Verona and part of the specialist team deployed on the wreck.

“I grabbed a piece of floating debris, and I couldn’t see what it was until I had my head out of the water. It was a woman’s shoe,” he said.

“We’re waiting today for new openings to be made, and we’ll see if the visibility is any better in those points.”

Coast guard spokesman Cosimo Nicastro said work would focus on an evacuation assembly area on the partially submerged fourth deck, where most of the 11 bodies found so far have been located.

“It’s where we have already found seven of the bodies and it’s where the passengers and crew gathered to abandon ship,” said coast guard spokesman Cosimo Nicastro.

At least 23 people are still missing from the 4,200 passengers and crew aboard when disaster struck the Concordia, a vast floating resort just two hours into a week-long cruise of the western Mediterranean.

As the search work continued, relatives of some of the missing arrived at the scene, although no serious hope remained of finding anyone alive in the icy waters.

“We are asking that in this moment all the rescue team units and authorities don’t lose any time and do everything they can to recover or find, dead or alive, my daughter,” said Sartonino Soria who had come from Peru after learning that his daughter Erika, a member of the crew, was missing.

“This is the reason why we are here and we will not leave until we have found Erika,” he said.

Italian authorities have put up a list of 28 missing people on an interior ministry web site, though they say that probably included five people found dead on Tuesday who are so far unidentified.

The list of people still unaccounted for on Tuesday evening included 13 German, four French, five Italian and two American passengers, together with four crew members from Italy, India, Hungary and Peru.

Dutch maritime services company SMIT said it was ready to start pumping fuel from the stricken liner as early as Wednesday once search operations for missing people have ended and they get the go-ahead from local authorities.

However there was no word on when the work may begin. Authorities fear that stronger winds forecast for the coming days may hinder recovery work and pose a potential threat to the stability of the ship, which rests on a submerged rock outcrop.

The Concordia lies on its side in some 20 meters of water but the rock shelf soon falls away into much deeper water and the wreck could slide down by as much as 130 meters if it shifts free from the rocks.

ALARM RAISED

As the search continued, a dramatic recording of a coast guard commander angrily orderingSchettino to return to the ship to direct rescue operations has transfixed Italy and made a media hero out of the straight-talking coast guard captain Gregorio De Falco.

“Thank you captain,” wrote the daily Corriere della Sera newspaper in a front page editorial which said that De Falco’s energetic and decisive words were as a wider call to a sense of personal responsibility in Italy.

Schettino is accused of multiple manslaughter, causing a shipwreck by sailing too close to shore and abandoning ship before all his passengers and crew scrambled off.

He has denied the charges and told magistrates on Tuesday he believed he should be credited with saving “hundreds, if not thousands” of lives because he brought the ship close to shore after it hit a rock, lawyer Bruno Leporatti said.

Video taken from a rescue helicopter in the early hours of Saturday, using a night vision camera, showed an extraordinary scene of dozens of passengers being gingerly lowered on ropes down the upturned hull of the ship into rescue boats.

The ship foundered after striking a rock as dinner was being served on Friday night. The owners say the captain swung inshore to “make a bow” to the islanders, who included a retired Italian admiral. Investigators say it was within 150 meters of shore.

Most of the passengers and crew survived despite hours of chaos and confusion after the collision. The alarm was raised not by an SOS from the ship but mobile phone calls from passengers on board to Italian police on the mainland.

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It comes as Italian emergency services deny reports in La Stampa newspaper that a seventh body has been found on the Costa Concordia.

The increased death toll was reported in the Italian media after “black box” recordings showed the ship’s captain ignored an order to get back on board.

Taped telephone conversations released by authorities suggest Francesco Schettino was evasive when ordered by a port official to supervise the rescue.

Officials said last night a total of 29 people remained missing, while six have been confirmed dead after the cruise liner collided into a reef off the Tuscan coast near the island of Giglio.

Two controlled explosions were carried out early this morning to allow firefighters and scuba divers to enter parts of the ship that they had not yet been able to search.

The number of those still being sought – 25 passengers and four crew members – rose after authorities revealed some of those previously counted as safe had still not contacted family members.

At least three Italian families have said that although their loved ones were listed among those safely evacuated, they had not heard any word from them.

About 10 Germans are thought to be among those unaccounted for.

And while coast guard official Marco Brusco said he held a “glimmer of hope” that more survivors may still be found, Giglio Mayor Sergio Ortelli said earlier that hopes of finding any of them alive were minimal.

Schettino is due in court later charged with manslaughter, abandoning ship and causing a shipwreck – all of which he denies.

A conversation between the captain and a coastguard official recorded on one of the ship’s “black boxes” was revealed through the release of a transcript.

“Now you go to the bow, you climb up the emergency ladder and co-ordinate the evacuation,” the official reportedly tells him.

“You must tell us how many people, children, women and passengers are there and the exact number of each category.

“What are you doing? Are you abandoning the rescue? Captain, this is an order, I am the one in charge now. You have declared abandoning ship, There are already bodies.”

“How many?” Schettino says, to which the official responds: “That is for you to tell me, what are you doing? Do you want to go home?”

Schettino said in an earlier telephone call that “(We) cannot get on board because the rear of the ship is keeling over.”

ANSA news agency also said there was a kind of “mutiny” among the crew which decided on an evacuation before being given formal orders by the captain.

Schettino has been accused by the vessel’s owner, Costa Cruises, of sailing close to land to “make a salute”.

Meanwhile, it has emerged that in 2010 Schettino gave an interview to a Czech newspaper where he said he never wanted to face a scenario like the Titantic.

He told Dnes: “I wouldn’t like to be in the role of the captain of the Titanic, having to sail in an ocean of icebergs.

“But I think that thanks to preparation, you can handle any situation and deal with potential problems.”

Costa Cruises chairman Pier Luigi Foschi has apologised for the tragedy, which has left dozens of the 4,200 people on board injured and the 114,000-tonne ship lying on its side off Tuscany.

And Clarence Mitchell, who is representing Costa Cruises, said: “Mr Foschi confirmed the captain had been approaching the island of Giglio to ‘make a salute’.

“The company says this (incident) was caused by an attempt by the captain to show the ship to the port.

“But there’s a criminal investigation going on and we’re not going to say anything that’s going to compromise that or the captain’s case.”

Prosecutor Francesco Verusio said the captain’s alleged conduct was “inexcusable.”

“We are struck by the unscrupulousness of the reckless manoeuvre that the commander of the Costa Concordia made near the island of Giglio.”

It comes after some of the 35 Britons on board described the panic that ensued after the ship collided with rocks.

The tragedy could also become an environmental crisis as rough seas battering the ship have raised fears fuel might leak into waters that are part of a protected sanctuary for dolphins, porpoises and whales.

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The head of the Italian coastguard, Marco Brusco, said there was “a glimmer of hope” for finding more survivors since the giant half-submerged vessel had not yet been fully inspected, but rescuers said the chances were now slim.

Brusco said four crew members and 25 tourists including six Italians remained unaccounted for. A German official said at least 10 German nationals were still missing and two US nationals were also yet to be found.

Six bodies have so far been found in the wreck of the Costa Concordia, which occurred off the coast of the picturesque island of Giglio late on Friday the 13th.

Three of the victims — two French passengers and one Peruvian crew member — drowned after jumping into the chilly Mediterranean waters to escape.

Rodolfo Raiteri, head of the coastguard’s diving team, told AFP on the shore: “The conditions inside are disastrous. It’s very difficult. The corridors are cluttered and it’s hard for the divers to swim through.”

Choppy seas forced rescuers to temporally evacuate the 17-deck Costa Concordia for several hours on Monday after the ship slipped on a rocky shelf under the sea, sparking fears that the hulk could sink entirely.

Giglio mayor Sergio Ortelli warned that the stricken vessel, which hit submerged rocks and keeled over off the island holiday spot, was an “ecological timebomb” in the pristine waters of a marine nature reserve.

The head of the company that owns the vessel said it had hit a rock as a result of an “inexplicable” error by the captain, Francesco Schettino, who was arrested on Saturday along with first officer Ciro Ambrosio.

“He carried out a manoeuvre which had not been approved by us and we disassociate ourselves from such behaviour,” said Pier Luigi Foschi, the boss of Costa Crociere, Europe’s largest cruise operator.

Italian prosecutors accuse Schettino and Ambrosio of abandoning ship before all the passengers were rescued.

A transcript of a conversation between Schettino and a port official was released Monday showing that the captain refused to return to the ship.

“You must tell us how many people, children, women and passengers are there and the exact number of each category,” the official tells Schettino, according to the transcript of the conversation on one of the ship’s “black boxes”.

“What are you doing? Are you abandoning the rescue?” the official says.

The Costa Concordia was carrying more than 4,200 people when it ran aground shortly after starting a seven-day Mediterranean cruise on its way to Marseille in France and Barcelona in Spain, just as many passengers were having dinner.

Carnival Corp, the parent company of Costa Crociere, put the initial cost of the disaster at $85-95 million (67-75 million euros).

Island residents have already said the ship was sailing far too close to Giglio and had hit a reef known as the School Rocks, well known to inhabitants.

The Corriere della Sera reported Monday that the captain had passed close to the island’s rocky shores to please the head waiter who comes from Giglio.

It also quoted witnesses as claiming the waiter had warned Schettino just before the accident happened: “Careful, we are extremely close to the shore.”

Crews on Monday put down anti-spill booms as fears of a leak of the ship’s 2,380 tons of fuel rose and local officials called for strict curbs in the future on shipping routes in an area of outstanding natural beauty.

A Dutch company specialising in salvage operations, Smit, was to begin pumping out the fuel this week. Officials said the ship itself could then be taken off Giglio in an unprecedented operation using massive floating devices.

Passengers meanwhile described confusion on board as the lights went out and how they were at first told it was just an electrical fault — before the ship lurched sharply on to its side and panic set in.

Rose Metcalf, a 23-year-old crew member, wiped away tears as she told how she wrote a note to her mother in case she did not survive.

“There was absolute panic. It was just terrifying, I was just trying to keep people calm. People were white, people were crying, screaming,” she told BBC television on her return to England.

Ennio Aquilino, a fire brigade chief who was one of the first on the scene and still bore the scars from a fall during the rescue operation as he saved a French woman, said it had been “an apocalyptic scene.”

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Late Saturday a South Korean couple on their honeymoon were rescued when firefighters in the unsubmerged part of the Costa Concordia heard their screams.

Crews in dinghies were seen Sunday morning touching the hull with their hands. They were near the site of the 160-foot (50-meter) -long gash where water flooded in and caused the ship to fall on its side.

Coast guard officials have said divers will try to enter the belly of the ship in case anyone is still inside Italian news reports quoting local officials say some 40 people remain unaccounted for out of the 4,200 passengers and crew. Three people are confirmed dead.

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He has been trying to convince European leaders he has control of the debt crisis that has seen Italy’s cost of borrowing soar.

But there are fears that tax evasion and the increasing role of the mafia is robbing the Italian treasury of billions.

Italy’s national debt is 120% of all its annual economic output, which is not in itself unmanageable, but coupled with low growth and the overall malaise in the eurozone it has raised borrowing costs to record levels.

Italy has also had its credit rating downgraded by Standard and Poor’s by two notches, to BBB+ from A.

Mr Monti, who was installed as prime minister after the resignation of Silvio Berlusconi , has already passed a new austerity package of tax hikes and spending cuts – but now his fellow European leaders want to see it implemented effectively.

There are concerns that Italy – the third largest economy in the eurozone – is too big to bail.

One of Mr Monti’s first initiatives as PM was to start a crackdown on tax evasion, which is considered to be endemic and deprives the country’s treasury of an estimated 120bn euros a year.

Over Christmas he ordered tax officials to stop every luxury vehicle in a ski resort and the exclusive town of Portofino. They discovered that a fifth of the supercar owners declared incomes of less than 30,000 euros a year.

The government is now running TV adverts to try to stigmatise the practice, comparing tax evaders to parasites.

But Mr Monti faces another roadblock in his attempts to grow Italy’s coffers: the mafia, which is using the crisis to take a bigger slice of the pie.

A new report by the anti-crime organisation SOS Impresa suggests organised crime in Italy now generates an annual turnover of 140bn euros. From that, 100bn euros are believed to be profit.

Researchers believe the mafia is putting the squeeze on 200,000 Italian businesses, demanding protection payments and offering loans at extortionate rates.

And there is another concern – the mafia is increasingly offering the destitute special discounts on loans as a recruiting tool.

Professor Antonio La Spina, from Palermo University, told Sky News: “These loans are offered to ordinary people, not only to mafia members. So there is something like a welfare system.

“But we don’t know much about it. It is a trend, so maybe it will develop further in the future.”

As Europe tries to engineer a rescue package for the euro, Mr Monti’s ability to enforce the austerity measures he has passed will be closely monitored.

After his visit to London, he will return to Rome where he will host the French and German leaders before two crucial summits aimed at stabilising the eurozone.

Italy’s borrowing rates were eased at the end of the week, which has given Mr Monti a little breathing room, but the challenges remain immense.

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S&P on Friday cut the ratings of Italy, Spain, Portugal and Cyprus by two notches and the standings of France, Austria, Malta, Slovakia and Slovenia by one notch each. That put highly indebted Italy on the same BBB+ level as Kazakhstan.

Asked in an interview broadcast by Austrian radio on Saturday if Italy was “problem child number one,” he said:

“In a certain sense, yes, because we know this year Italy has a very significant refinancing need. Italian banks also need refinancing.

“In normal times this is all possible, in very nervous and difficult times it can be a problem and in my view this sharp downgrade of Italy is probably one of the most difficult and problematic aspects of this sweeping blow from the ratings agency.”

Nowotny, who is governor of Austria’s central bank, said he did not think Austria’s losing its top rating from S&P would have any serious immediate consequences, noting markets normally look to see whether at least two agencies downgrade a country.

But he added: “It cannot be ruled out that there is a deterioration in Europe overall and this could probably affect Austria.”

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