london. here are the headlines. this just coming in. operations at the shipwrecked costa concordia is been temporarily halted because the ship is shifting. the captain is under house arrest as he awaits possible charges of manslaughter and abandoning ship. meanwhile, divers are working to remove a second data recorder from the abandoned ship. they recovered more bodies, bringing the death toll to 11. the arab league is set to end its mission this week, but anti-government protests show no sign of epding any time soon in syria. the government has rejected suggestions that arab league peacekeepers should be deployed to syria. in myanmar, some signs of political change. pro democracy leader aung san suu kyi is registered in parliament. she's running in a country that's still largely controlled by its military. those are the headlines from cnn, the world's news leader. i'm zain verjee, and world business today starts now beginning with the coverage of a blackout to protest anti-piracy legislation. hello and welcome to wbt. i'm nina del santos in london. >> the stories this january the 18th. the battle lines withdrawn. proposed site, including wikipedia shut down in protest. jerry yang, a one time visionary, quits as yahoo tries to chart a new course. and driven to destruction by the data deluge. how working away from your desk is affecting your work rate when you get back to it. imagine a world without free knowledge. those are the words on the home page of wikipedia, which has taken down its website as part of a coordinateded political protest supported by websites, including google, mindcraft, and boing boing. they're proposing legislation in the u.s. that would block access to sites containing copyrighted material. media organization supporting the bills says piracy costs them billions of dollars. but wikipedia's co-founder says free speech is at risk. >> at issue is this law is very badly written, very broad, overreaching, and would -- at least the senate version, it includes an emf blocking regime similar to the one used by china. >> those bills have created something of a storm of debate online about what impact they would have on the future of the internet. maggie lake takes a look at who's weighing into the row now. >> reporter: it's a black and ominous morning that reads like a movie trailer. on wednesday, january 18th, the site wikipedia, along with boing boing, and the cheezburger network of comedy sites all plan to go dark. dual bills known as sopa and pipa, known as stop online privacy act and protect ip act, stop sites which allows users to share downloads of movies and other digital content. since it's hard for u.s. companies to actually shut down foreign sites, the new law is aimed to cut off access by requiring u.s. search engines, advertising networks, and other providers to withhold their services. the technology industry agrees piracy is a problem, but says these measures go too far. >> you don't want these companies to be absolutely liable for everything somebody may post on their site. if you think of facebook, if you think of twitter, if you think of google and ebay, et cetera, people put things, users put things onto company sites. companies can't control that. well, they could by censorship, and that's what we want to avoid. >> reporter: media companies, including cnn's parent time warner, support the legislation. and the motion picture association of america says, "neither of these bills implicate free expression but focus solely on illegal conduct, which is not free speech." news corp. chairman rupert murdoch has been even more cutting in his criticism. he says "piracy leader is google who streams movies free, sells advertisements around them. no wonder pouring millions into lobbying." the solidarity the tech industry is showing for this legislation is a change, and industry watchers say it has helped them galvanize public opinion. >> tech companies did a good job of trying to boil it down to one sentence, saying it's going to break the internet. this is going to ruin the internet as we know it. they're really, really strong statements. that's a great way to make it a lightning rod, the same way that occupy became a way that people will spread comments over the news sites, writing on their blogs, on twitter, on facebook. and sopa is becoming similar in that it's a really lightning rod word, and people are taking it and running with it. >> reporter: the debate has been slowed in washington. a house hearing scheduled for wednesday has been postponed, but both sides vow to fight on for what they see as essential aspects of their business. maggie lake, cnn, new york. >> already doubt has been cast on the future of these bills after the white house itself said it wouldn't support legislation that allows censorship. in response, rupert murdoch has been tweeting "big bipartisan majorities, both houses sold out by the potus -- that's the president of the united states for people like us -- "for search engines. and how about 2.2 million workers in the entertainment industry? piracy rules." >> certainly going to be an interesting debate. see how that one develops. we're going to stay on the internet for a moment because yahoo's co-founder jerry yang has resigned from the board of the faltering tech giant. yang, known as chief yahoo founded the company in 1995. the past several years, he's been criticized for holding up major investment deals, leading to a fall in the stock price. remy, you've been looking at the story of yang and yahoo. certainly he's been a controversial figure with the company in recent history. >> he definitely has. most analysts and investors are seeing his exit as heralding a happier and hopefully more profitable future for the company that include yahoo selling off its stakes right here in asia, such as tech giant ali ba alibaba or yahoo japan. yahoo's stock has fallen 54% since 2007. it hasn't bounced back. they saw a big merger with microsoft go up in smoke in 2008. microsoft made a hostile takeover bid of $47 billion. it did rocket the share price, and yang rejected it. investors weren't happy. he was replaced by carol barts. she would come back to haunt the company. carol bartz was fired as ceo. she failed to turn the company around. investors glad to see the back of her. yahoo shares jumped 12% in the two days after that. on october 1st, just about a month later, this happened. basically yahoo shares surged 17% in two days after jack ma, the founder of e-commerce giant alibaba said he wanted to buy yahoo lock, stock, and barrel. this is how they closed yesterday, but it did pop 3% on news of yang's departure as he's been seen as a block to change. many think that change was due. >> i just want to go back to something you said there. one of the deals that didn't succeed under the yang leadership was that merger. jack maher wanting to buy yahoo back for his company alibaba. >> it's been a question in the past which fish is bigger, alibaba or yahoo. i spoke to richard lye, editor in chief of in gadget china, and he says that alibaba is the bigger of those firms. >> in many ways, it's more successful and has grown much, much quicker than yahoo over the last several years. if yahoo does the right thing and continues to take a bigger chunk out of alibaba, it's obviously good for yahoo. then jack maher has been quoted as saying alibaba wants to buy the entire yahoo. you can see these two companies loobing like they want to take a bigger bite out of each other. >> if yahoo unloaded all of its shares of alibaba, the company would be worth $17 billion. with yang's departure, analysts say a share sale is more likely to happen. it's what yahoo's current ceo scott thompson wants to do. as for yang, he's leading to pursue other interests. andrew? >> ramy, thanks very much for that. at least on a brighter note, for some investors, shares of apple have reached a record high. four years after steve jobs rejoined the company and a year after it bought out the first ipod, apple shares are worth just over $11. this is what's happened since. ten years and hups of millions of iphones later, the stock is worth this much. $424.70. if you bought shares of apple in 2002, your investment would be worth 40 times what you paid for it back then. hindsight is a wonderful thing, nina. >> certainly is. it's also a dangerous thing as many an investor will tell you, andrew. historical performance is no guarantee of future returns, is it? that's certainly the kind of thing we're seeing on the european stock markets today. after two straight days of gains for these markets, they finally turned. as you can see, all of them down to the tune of one-third of 1% to .1 of 1% on the dax. this is the growth prospects coming out of the influential world bank. it is concerned about a shortlived recession for the eurozone and the world's developing countries that have been exhibiting a high rate of growth will not be safe if the eurozone has troubles and does have a recession. what they're doing is they cut their growth estimates to 2.5% from a previous estimate of 3.6% for this coming year, 2012, and also they brought down their growth estimate for the year after. that's one of the reasons these are down. >> okay. we've got a bit more on that as well a bit later on in the show. meanwhile, here in asia, most markets finishing with gains after a choppy morning session. as you can see there, the nikkei in tokyo had the best day, down by 1%, led by banking stocks. exporters remain mixed. the yen remains strong against particularly the euro at the moment. that's causing concerns. companies like toyota down .5% on the same front. sony up by nearly 1%. sydney had mining and metals companies higher. if you look at shanghai, big gains yesterday. well over 4% up on the back of the gdp number. shanghai taking profit taking, down by 1.4%. coming up next on "world business today," dramatic new audio recordings of the moments after the captain of the costa concordia abandoned his stricken ship. we'll tell you why he was ordered back on board and the latest on the ongoing rescue operation. i'm good about washing my face. but sometimes i wonder... what's left behind? 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"chocolate's child slaves" premieres friday at 8:00 p.m. gmt. >> tracing the chocolate supply chain is a slow process. companies don't know where most of their cocoa comes from. nestle admits it can only trace a fifth of its supply chains. but sophie says traceability is a difficult process. >> we work with farmers who only buy from their members. the cocoa goes from beans into sacks, and the sacks are marked with that village those farmers live in coop cocoa. the sacks go on ships which come into europe and get processed into cocoa butter and cocoa liquor, and then that marked cocoa butter gets sent to a chocolate factory and gets used as chocolate in divine. so we work with the farmers in coop cocoa. because they're part of the fair trade system, fair trade comes and audits them. fair trade checks the money they say they're going to get but also check they're running an orderly system. >> the issue of forced labor in the cocoa industry must seem like a world away for the people on trading floors and also in rich companies buying chocolate. from january last year, though, fair trade cocoa changed hands for a minimum price of $200,000 a ton plus a $200 premium on top of that traded price. access to the exchanges in london and new york where cocoa is traded is practically impossible for small growers on their own. so the fair trade cooperative helps small growers stand up for themselves. cnn spent the day with a cocoa trader who shows exactly why this is such a volatile commodity. >> hello. my name is nick gintilly. i'm a senior adviser based in jersey city, new jersey. this is home base. our office is across the street. my heart will always be in lower manhattan. even though i'm upstairs in an office and i can trade any commodity i want in the world, somehow i always come back to the boutique market of cocoa. it's in my blood. as you can see, cocoa is the first market that i have on my quote board. my co-worker steve lampe based out of london. we're on skype. >> the grains are getting hit. >> this is the cocoa market live right now. i'll do a live trade for you right now. here we go. okay. we're filled. we're speculating on the price. we think the price is going lower. so we want to capture a move and generate revenue for our clients. the feeling in the cocoa market right now, we're oversupplied. demand is running at a steady pace right now, but demand is not increasing. that will drive the price of cocoa lower. and we also have to take into consideration what's going on in the world, in europe with the sovereign debt crisis. when there is a macro event, all the markets feel it. the market's live right now. i am out $1,560 on the trade i initiated two minutes ago. it takes a certain personality, in my opinion, to trade these markets because of the volatility. it's sort of like an adrenaline rush to me. 2011 was a roller coaster year in cocoa. a slow jump out of a plane with a parachute, and then we jumped on the rocket ship and the market exploded. this is when we were seeing upheaval, fighting in the ivory coast. as the fighting was going on, the market gradually worked its way higher. after that, the market has slowly but surely declined. if i could forecast where we were going to close at the end of the year, i wouldn't be sitting in this chair right now. today we had had a very nice day. we made money today. we're winding down our day. it's come to an end, and i could actually shut off my trading platform and say it's time to go home. i will give you a call later. >> okay. >> when my day ends, come to the store across the street, and today got to buy a snickers bar. got to keep consumption of chocolate up. we had a good week this week. we all deserve a treat. welcome back to "world business today." the global economic outlook is bleak, and europe has a lot to answer for. if its latest forecast, the world ban