Here is the latest from the crashed cruise ship. Apparently the woman who was seeing having dinner with the coward captain has came to light and spoken. She has spoken in his defense and has called him great for bringing the ship close to the shore. Hold up! did she forget that he caused all of this? Did she forget that showing off lead to the death of too many people? Please somebody get this genius away from any reporters please! And she’s blonde which doesn’t help the stereotype(lol). Click below to read the story.

@WiLMajor

Capt. Francesco Schettino had dinner with a young woman just before he ran his massive luxury liner aground while showing off, and brought her up to the bridge after the ship began to sink.

Domnica Cemortan, a 25-year-old Moldovan hostess who was not listed as passenger or crew on the Costa Concordia, told reporters in Bucharest that she was the mystery blond passengers saw with the married 52-year-old skipper that fateful night.

She insisted he was a hero for turning the ship around and bringing it close to shore after the accident so passengers could swim to land.

“He saved us,” Cemortan insisted. “I believe that he did an extraordinary job — the whole crew thinks so. He saved more than 3,000 people.”

The luxury liner had more than 4,200 people aboard. About 30 are confirmed dead or are presumed so.

Cemortan, who worked for the cruise line but was on vacation, is the woman in the sleeveless black dress that passengers saw having dinner with the captain and others before the ship sailed too close to the island of Giglio.

Passenger Angelo Fabbri snapped a picture of a waitress pouring wine for the table at 8:44 p.m. Friday, exactly an hour before the $450 million Costa Concordia hit rocks and began to sink. He said he thought the woman was the married captain’s daughter.

A dancer who also speaks four languages, Cemortan told a Romanian paper that after the crash, she was called up to the bridge to help translate orders for the international crew and the handful of Russian passengers.

“Francesco Schettino is one of the best captains in the company,” she said. “The accusation that he left the ship early is false, because I left the bridge at 11:50 p.m. and he was still there.”

Schettino — who left the ship well before everyone was safely evacuated — is under house arrest, facing charges of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning ship.

Schettino admitted to an Italian judge that he miscalculated when steering the ship close to the island of Giglio to perform a sail-past salute to people onshore.

“I’m a victim of my own kindness” he told the judge, according to the newspaper Corriere della Sera.

In an equally tone-deaf statement, the Costa Crociere cruise line’s assistant director, Monica Bove, published a letter defending the ship’s crew as heroes and slamming the survivors for complaining of chaos during the sinking.

“I have read, seen and heard with much bitterness the nonsense from these survivors, who tend as usual towards sensationalism rather than information,” Bove wrote, generating enormous outrage in Italy.

The cruise line also suspended Schettino Thursday.

A new audio tape confirmed earlier accounts from the Coast Guard that on top of all his other mistakes, Schettino also down-played the crisis for more than an hour, telling officials on land that the ship has suffered an electrical blackout — not a hull breach that would sink her.

A Coast Guard official in Livorno contacted the ship at 10:12 p.m. — 40 minutes after the crash — to ask if help was required.

“We have a blackout on board. We are checking the situation,” came the reply from the liner.

“What type of problem, only generators? Because the police got a call from a relative of a crew member who said that during the dinner everything fell on his head,” said the Coast Guard.

“No, negative, we have a blackout and we are verifying the conditions on board,” the liner replied.

Schettino’s wife, Fabiola Russo, issued a statement Wednesday defending her husband’s professionalism and cautioning against a rush to judgment.

DN