Taliban insurgents said Tuesday they had told mobile phone operators to shut down their networks during the day in the Ghazni province, southwest of Kabul, saying signals help track insurgent fighters.

The warning comes on top of a Taliban order earlier this year for phone operators to turn off their networks throughout the country at night.

“We have informed mobile companies operating in Ghazni to turn off their signals during the daytime now as it endangers the lives of our fighters,” Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman told Reuters.

“We want the companies to cut off their signal for 10 days from now,” he said, adding that the order might be extended.

Five mobile operators, three of them foreign companies, with an estimated investment of several hundred million of dollars, have set up business in Afghanistan since U.S.-led and Afghan forces toppled the Taliban in 2001.

Taliban insurgents in the past have destroyed several mobile phone towers in the south causing resentment among residents for whom mobile phones are a vital means of communication.

The night-time shutdown has been only partially enforced in the south and most networks continue to operate freely in the more peaceful north of the country.

EBay Inc will institute a global ban on the sale of all ivory products via its online auction site by January 1, after a conservation group found over 4,000 illegal elephant ivory listings by sellers.

African and Asian elephants are protected under the U.S. Endangered Species Act and the international Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

“We feel this is the best way to protect the endangered and protected species from which a significant portion of ivory products are derived,” eBay said on its blog on Tuesday.

A British motorcyclist who posted footage of himself performing dangerous stunts and speeding at up to 130 mph (209 kph) on YouTube was given a 12-week jail term on Monday.

Sandor Ferenci, 28, performed wheelies, skids and raced on the opposite side of the road around Banbury, Oxfordshire, in June this year and then put the footage on the video-sharing website.

Ferenci, who admitted two counts of dangerous driving at a previous hearing was jailed at Oxford Crown Court and disqualified from driving for two years, the Press Association reported.

He will have to take an extended driving test before he is allowed on the road again.

Prosecutor Brian Payne said a motorist who saw Ferenci’s antics on the A422 Banbury to Brackley road took down his registration number and later contacted police.

When officers called at his home, Ferenci asked them: “Is this about the YouTube video?”

First a CD-trading site, then a free Web-based music browser, lala.com is being born again.

The site is relaunching Tuesday as a hybrid, offering the digital download functionality of iTunes and the free music streaming of MySpace Music without the ads.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based private company, backed by $35 million in venture capital from Bain Capital LLC, Ignition Partners and Warner Music Group Corp., first launched in July 2006.

Its first version lacked scale and the second was met by numerous me-too players from MySpace and iMeem to Last.FM, said co-founder Bill Nguyen.

This time around, listening to any of the 6 million tracks at lala.com will be free. It will cost 10 cents to put a song in a Web locker for unending access on any computer where the user logs in.

Another 79 or 89 cents allows the user to download an MP3 track, with no digital rights management coding.

Because the site is ad-free, the business relies on selling Web tracks and MP3s.

“Where we get into trouble is if we do a lot of streaming and we don’t sell music,” Nguyen said.

Users of lala.com’s test site - who number nearly 300,000 - are buying enough music to put the site on the path to profitability.

In the testing period, for every 1,000 free streams, the site sold about 60 Web songs and 60 MP3s. It needs to sell 15 to 20 of each per thousand free streams to be profitable, said spokesman John Kuch.