Monday:  Giglio, Italy (CNN) -- Italian authorities are considering when to call off the search for survivors aboard the wreck of the cruise liner Costa Concordia, the coast guard said Thursday, as rescuers used explosives to blow new holes in the ship in search of victims.

Authorities are mulling when to change the operation from rescue to recovery, coast guard spokesman Cosimo Nicastro said Thursday. Divers continued their search of the wreck into Thursday evening.

At least 11 people are known to have died in the disaster, and 21 are still missing, according to the Italian Crisis Unit.

Coast guard records published Thursday by an Italian newspaper pile further pressure on the captain of the Concordia and his officers, suggesting authorities first became aware of the crash from a friend of the mother of a passenger about 15 minutes after the ship hit rocks. Also, a cook from the ship told a Filipino television station the captain ordered dinner less than an hour after the collision.

The coast guard identified the ship in trouble and contacted it, asking if there were problems on board, at 10:14 p.m. -- more than half an hour after the 9:41 p.m. collision -- according to a coast guard log published in the newspaper La Repubblica.

The ship responded that it was experiencing a "black out," according to the log, and said the crew believed it could solve the problem in a short time. The log does not indicate which crew member was speaking.

What appears to be the audio of that first radio call between the Costa Concordia and the coast guard was broadcast on Italian media Thursday.

A coast guard official is heard to ask: "What kind of a problem is it? Just something with the generator? The police of Prato have received a phone call from the relatives of a sailor who said that during the dinner everything was falling on his head."

The unidentified crew member responds: "We have a black out and we are checking the conditions on board."

"The passengers say they have been told to put on the life vests, is this correct?" the coast guard then asks, to which the crew member repeats the same answer, before promising to keep the coast guard updated.

Criticism from both Costa Cruises and the authorities has focused so far on Capt. Francesco Schettino, who is under house arrest and facing possible charges of manslaughter, shipwreck and abandoning ship.

Schettino ordered dinner for himself and a woman less than an hour after the collision, cook Rogelio Barista told GMA Network.

"We wondered what was going on. ... At that time, we really felt something was wrong. ... The stuff in the kitchen was falling off shelves and we realized how grave the situation was," Barista said.

Authorities accuse the captain of piloting the ship too fast to allow him to react to dangers, causing the shipwreck, according to legal papers.

Experts are performing toxicology tests on a sample of his hair, prosecutor Francesco Verusio said Thursday.

Verusio is preparing a motion to have Schettino sent back to jail from house arrest, he said.

Verusio also vowed to investigate the leak of legal documents related to the case, saying they did not come from his office.

Also on Thursday, Italian officials identified two victims as Jeanne Gannard, 70, and Pierre Gregoire, 69, both from France, the Italian Crisis Unit said.

Eight victims have now been named -- four French passengers, a Spanish passenger, and an Italian one, and one crew member each from Hungary and Peru.

Nearly a week after the wreck, it appears increasingly unlikely that any survivors will still be found aboard the ship.

Italian mother Susy Albertini, whose 5-year-old daughter Dayana Arlotti is reportedly the youngest person still missing, is among those desperate for news of their loved ones.

"I would like the rescuers to not stop looking and continue looking -- my little girl, they need to bring her back home as soon as possible," she said. The girl's father, Albertini's ex-husband, William Arlotti, is also missing.

Declaring the operation to be recovery rather than rescue would allow salvage experts to start pumping fuel out of the ship, potentially averting an environmental catastrophe. 

The ship was carrying about 2,300 tons of fuel when it hit rocks off the coast of the Italian island of Giglio on Friday night. Schettino's brother-in-law defended him in an Italian newspaper on Thursday.

Schettino "managed to avoid a tragedy -- it could have been worse," Maurilio Russo said in Corrierre della Sera. And he denied that the captain had abandoned ship."He was not running away, he came down (from the ship) to survey the damage," Russo said.

Russo also said the route the captain took was not out of the ordinary.''It is a usual procedure, the owners are well aware of it, it is useless to pretend otherwise," he said. "Passengers pay to see something and skirting very close to the shore is part of the show. "Schettino's parish priest, Don Gennaro Starita, accused the media of "killing him" in an interview with an Italian newspaper. "It's a shame," he said. "Already there are all these dead people; do we want to add another one to the list?"

The priest said he plans to visit the captain in the next couple of days "to express solidarity." Judge Valeria Montesarchio's initial ruling found Schettino changed the ship's course, steering too close to shore and causing the ship to hit a rock.

The judge said the captain admitted to making a mistake and said that, at the time of the collision, he was navigating by sight.

In her preliminary investigation, Montesarchio said there appears to be considerable evidence against the captain, whom she said showed "imprudence and inexperience."

The judge also found that Schettino made no serious attempt to return to the ship after the crash, that he underestimated the damage to the Concordia, and that he failed to alert authorities in a timely manner.

"The captain could not but realize right away the gravity of the situation both because of the tilt and because he was alerted by the crew of the water influx," Montesarchio said.

The captain abandoned ship while at least 100 people were still on board, the judge said.

Montesarchio described the shipwreck as "a disaster of global proportion."

Costa Cruises chairman Pier Luigi Foschi earlier this week placed the blame for the wreck squarely on the captain, saying it was his choice to deviate from frequently traveled routes.

"We believe it has been a human error here," Foschi said Monday. "The captain did not follow the authorized route, which is used by Costa ships very frequently. There's probably more than 100 times in one year we have this route."

There were roughly 4,200 people on the Costa Concordia when it ran aground -- about 3,200 passengers and 1,000 crew members, the vast majority of whom made it off the ship safely.

Costa Cruises said it was contacting all passengers on the ship "to make sure they have returned home and are well, and to confirm that they will receive a refund for the cruise and all material expenses relating to it."

Carnival Corporation, the parent company of Costa Cruises, said Thursday that it will audit and review the safety and response procedures across all its cruise lines after last week's accident.

"While I have every confidence in the safety of our vessels and the professionalism of our crews, this review will evaluate all practices and procedures to make sure that this kind of accident doesn't happen again," Carnival CEO Micky Arison said in a statement.

COMMENT: I think this type of persons like the captain of these cruise  is to be ashamed off, because the work that he had to do he didn't do it, the captain left the cruise and didn't help anyone on the cruise. I hope the chicken of the sea (that's how they call to the captain) be punished of what he had done.

Wednesday: (CNN) -- Apple on Thursday lifted the veil on its plans to remake the educational landscape in a way that centers on its best-selling tablet computer, the iPad.

"Education is deep in Apple's DNA and iPad may be our most exciting education product yet," Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of marketing, said in a statement.

At a press conference in New York, the company announced three products that aim to get students and teachers to use the iPad's touch-screen interface to read, write, plan classes and communicate with each other.

First, a free app called iBooks Author lets anyone create a digital, interactive textbook.

In a demo at the event, an Apple employee created an e-book with the app in about five minutes, according to live blogs.

Second, an update to a piece of software called iTunes U lets teachers plan their curriculum and communicate with their students over the iPad.

The new iTunes U, which also is free and available on Thursday, will "allow anyone, anywhere, at any time to take courses for free," Schiller said, according to Fortune.com's Philip Elmer-DeWitt, who was live blogging from the event. Fortune is a partner site of CNN.com.

"If you're an educator at a university, college, or K-12 school, now you have an easy way to design and distribute complete courses featuring audio, video, books, and other content," Apple's website said Thursday. "And students and lifelong learners can experience your courses for free through a powerful new app for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch."

Finally, a new textbook store called iBooks 2, also a free app, will feature digital e-books for schools.

Apple said it is partnering with several major textbook companies -- including Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, who will make e-books for the store, according to Fortune.

High school textbooks start at $14.99, the company said.

In another demo, Apple's Roger Rosner showed off textbooks for the iPad that allow students to zoom in on pictures of cells, dissect digital frogs and make notes and highlights on the e-book pages.

"I don't think there's ever been a textbook that made it this easy to be a good student," Rosner said, according to Fortune.

All of these moves are part of Apple's larger strategy to remake the textbook industry. The company reportedly has been courting schools to make use of its popular tablet computer.

At the press conference, Schiller mocked paper textbooks, saying, "They're not portable, not durable, not interactive, not searchable." Books on the iPad are all of those things, he said, according to live blogs covering the event.

Some educators seem to be excited about the changes.

"Apple has recognized that learning for students is not a one-way street," Jed Macosko, an associate professor at Wake Forest University, said in a statement.

"Until now, most traditional e-textbooks have focused on linear content delivery, which is not the way people learn. Research shows that we learn by asking questions," said Macosko, the author of an interactive biology textbook.

Others questioned whether the move could give Apple too much control over educational content.

"(It's) not clear so far whether Apple's new textbooks will be open formats (ePub etc.) or only in Apple format," Mathew Ingram, a senior writer for the blog GigaOm, posted on Twitter after the event.

Or they mocked the fact that Apple is trying to take such a big role in education.

"For a small upcharge, Apple will put a huge logo on your school and tattoo an Apple on each (student's) forearm," user @irasocol wrote on Twitter.

COMMENT: I think this selling tablet computer was a great invention to all the humanity, a great invention because it helps everyone to do different types of things. It would be cool if in our school and in all the others we had the iPad, it would be easier to work and to search things, it would be very expensive too.

Thursday: (CNN) -- The Arab League was negotiating an extension of its fact-finding mission in Syria Thursday, with its members due to report over the weekend on what they have witnessed of a months-long government crackdown on protests.

Ambassador Adnan Al Khudeir, the Cairo-based head of the monitoring operation, said the league and the Syrian government were negotiating an extension to their mandate, which was scheduled to end Thursday.

A senior Arab League official, who could not be named because he was not authorized to speak on the matter, said the monitors would remain in Syria while the issue was discussed -- and that all signs pointed to an extension being agreed to by both sides.

A handful of Arab League members will meet Saturday, led by Qatar, before the full 22-state body meets Sunday in Cairo to discuss the monitors' final findings, the official said.

The United Nations is not sending monitors itself but is providing technical training to the Arab League observers, he added.

The uprising, driven by calls for President Bashar al-Assad's resignation, reforms and democratic elections, is in its 10th month. It has prompted a bloody government crackdown that has claimed at least 5,000 lives since it began in March, according to the United Nations. Opposition groups put the death toll at more than 6,000.

The Arab League has called on Damascus to stop violence against civilians, free political detainees, remove tanks and weapons from cities and allow outsiders, including the international news media, to travel freely around Syria.

The purpose of its month-long fact-finding mission was to see if the government was adhering to an agreement to end the violence.

But opposition activists and human rights monitors say the Syrian government has not stopped its aggressive actions against protesters since the mission began December 26, and have questioned the mission's effectiveness.

Meanwhile, opposition activist groups continue to report outbreaks of violence elsewhere around the country.

The Local Coordination Committees of Syria, an opposition umbrella group, said 25 people were killed Thursday, including seven in Idlib, six in Hama and four in Homs. Four people were killed in Deir Ezzor and three in the Damascus suburbs, with one more death in Qameshly, the group said.

Gunfire was reported in many neighborhoods in Hama, with mourners at a mosque also coming under fire. Some roads out of the city have been closed off, while snipers are positioned on rooftops, the LCC said.

In Douma, a suburb of Damascus, the naked body of a young man bearing signs of torture was found in the street, the group said, adding that government security forces took the body and arrested several people.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights earlier said one civilian was killed and seven wounded in Homs Thursday by mortar rounds fired at the neighborhood of Baba Howd. Another four activists, who were in hiding, were shot dead in the Idlib region when security forces ambushed them in a mountain village, the Observatory said.

The LCC said 21 people were killed by government troops Wednesday.

The Arab League monitors have been greeted ecstatically in some Syrian cities, where residents have recounted tales of government brutality.

In the town of Kisweh, which monitors visited Tuesday, one demonstrator spray-painted the letters "S.O.S." on a wall. On Sunday, crowds in Zabadani carried the monitors on their shoulders and urged them to stay to prevent reprisals.

Syrian activists said Wednesday that opposition forces had wrested control of Zabadani from government troops. They maintained control of the city Thursday, activists said.

"There was massive protests in Zabadani, so the Syrian Army tried to disperse them. But our troops were very organized and aggressive with a counter attack that left them fleeing and they withdrew completely out of the city," said Lt. Col. Mohamed Hamdo of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), a group made up of former government soldiers. "Our forces raised the flag of independence in Zabadani."

Hamdo said, though, that the opposition fighters "expect another confrontation" as the government forces regroup outside the town.

Although a number of journalists have been allowed into the country in recent days to travel with Arab League monitors on their fact-finding mission, CNN cannot verify many accounts of what is happening in Syria because the government restricts the activities of journalists.

The European Union announced Wednesday it was planning new sanctions against companies and individuals in Syria, as it seeks to put pressure on the al-Assad regime.

While Western powers have imposed sanctions on Syria during the 10-month crackdown, opposition by Russia and China has kept the U.N. Security Council from following suit.

The al-Assad government says it is fighting armed terrorist groups, which it blames for the violence.

COMMENT: It's great that the violence and the protests had finished in Syria. I hope it doesn't occur again in any of the countries of the world. This protest caused a lot of deaths and that's very sad, that's why I don't want that type of things happen again. Ithink the Arab League is doing great on extend the mission.