A child care staff member of the Excel after-school program at Bedford South School has been accused of taping the mouths of kids shut on Friday.

Jennex said she wants to reassure parents that this behaviour won’t be tolerated.

“This is totally unacceptable,” said Jennex, “I just want to reassure families that we are going be investigating, and we’re going to find out what happened, and we’re going to make sure nothing like this is ever reported again from our school system.”

She added the school board has jurisdiction over their staff members, so they will be working closely with the police to investigate the incident.

The Chronicle Herald reported the staff member allegedly lined the kids up on the wall with their mouths taped shut.

The staff member involved is off work while the investigation runs its course.

Bourgeois was killed on July 21st, 2007 and it’s hoped that people with information will come forward. Police have no leads.

No piece of information is too small, according to a program representative.

“That small piece of information that somebody provides us with may be a key, a big part of that unsolved puzzle,” says program director Roger Merrick.

Police responded to a report of gunshots on Maynard and Woodill streets and found Bourgeois with several gunshot wounds.

Two men were seen fleeing the area, one of whom had a gun, but neither were identified.

Police are asking anyone with information to call the Rewards for Major Unsolved Crimes Program at 1-888-710-9090.

Martin Frk paced the attack for Halifax in a 9-2 pounding of the London Knights. Frk scored a hat trick and added an assist as the Moose improved their record to 2-1 at the tournament.

Darcy Ashley scored twice while Stefan Fournier, Luca Ciampini, Brent Andrews and Ryan Falkenham added singles. Jonathan Drouin and Nathan MacKinnon chipped in with three assists each.

The Mooseheads are guaranteed a berth in Friday’s semi-finals and would advance directly to Sunday’s championship final if Portland scores a victory over Saskatoon in tonight’s round robin finale.

Around 8 p.m., police say a man near Devonshire Avenue and Albert Street was approached by a teen who asked him for a cigarette.

He gave him one, but was then punched in the face and robbed of everything in his pockets and his cell phone.

Three other teens then joined in kicking and punching the victim.

They are all described as black, about 16 to 18 years old, wearing mostly black clothing.

Police spokesman Kjell Lindgren says seven people were briefly detained early Wednesday and one person was arrested on suspicion of arson of a cultural centre housed in a 19th century building.

Lindgren says 30 vehicles were set ablaze in six suburbs where mainly immigrants live. Gangs of up to 60 youths also set fire to a school and a nursery and hurled rocks at police and fire fighters.

The unrest began Sunday in response to the May 13 shooting, in which police killed a 69-year-old, knife-wielding man in a northwestern suburb.

An Arizona restaurateur, fed up after years of negative online reviews and an embarrassing appearance on a reality television show, posted a social media rant laced with salty language and angry, uppercase letters that quickly went viral last week, to the delight of people who love a good Internet meltdown.

“I AM NOT STUPID ALL OF YOU ARE,” read the posting on the Facebook wall of Amy’s Baking Co. in suburban Phoenix. “YOU JUST DO NOT KNOW GOOD FOOD.”

It was, to put it kindly, not a best business practice. Add to that an appearance earlier this month on the Fox reality television show “Kitchen Nightmares” — where celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay gave up on trying to save the restaurant after he was insulted — and you have a recipe for disaster.

“That’s probably the worst thing that can happen,” said Sujan Patel, founder and CEO of Single Grain, a digital marketing agency in San Francisco.

In the evolving world of online marketing, where the power of word of mouth has been wildly amplified by the whims and first impressions of anonymous reviewers posting on dozens of social media websites, online comments, both good and bad, and the reactions they trigger from managers, can make all the difference between higher revenues and empty storefronts.

Hotels, restaurants and other businesses that depend on good customer service reviews have all grappled in recent years with how to respond to online feedback on sites such as Twitter, Foursquare, Yelp, Facebook and Instagram, where comments can often be more vitriol than in-person reviews because of the anonymous shield many social media websites provide.

No matter how ugly the reviews get, businesses need to be willing to admit mistakes and offer discounts to lure unhappy customers back, digital marketing experts said.

“In the past, people just sent bad soup back. Well, now they are getting on social media and telling all their friends and friends of friends how bad the soup was and why they should find other places to get soup in the future, so it takes the customer experience to another level,” said Tom Garrity of the Garrity Group, a public relations firm in New Mexico.

“The challenge becomes — how do you respond when someone doesn’t think your food or product is as great as you think it is?”

In Amy and Samy Bouzaglo’s case, the bad reviews were compounded by their horrible reality TV experience. The couple said during a recent episode of “Kitchen Nightmares” that they needed professional guidance after years of battling terrible online reviews. They opened the pizzeria in an upscale Scottsdale neighbourhood about six years ago.

“Kitchen Nightmares” follows Ramsay as he helps rebuild struggling restaurants. After one bite, he quickly deemed Amy’s Baking Co. a disaster and chided the Bouzaglos for growing increasingly irate over his constructive feedback. Among his many critiques: The store-bought ravioli smelled “weird,” a salmon burger was overcooked and a fig pizza was too sweet and arrived on raw dough.

“You need thick skin in this business,” Ramsay said before walking out. It was the first time he wasn’t able to reform a business, according to the show.

Amy’s Baking Co. temporarily closed last week after the episode aired. A Bouzaglo spokesman said the couple was not available for an interview Monday. The restaurant’s answering machine was full. Emails and Facebook messages were not returned.

A wall post published last week claimed the restaurant’s Facebook, Yelp and Twitter accounts had been hacked, but hundreds of commenters expressed doubt. Social media sites show someone posting as a member of the Bouzaglo family had been insulting customers over negative reviews since at least 2010.

The story bounced across the Internet, generating thousands of comments on Facebook, Yelp and Twitter, and prompting nearly 36,000 people to sign a petition on Change.org that asks the Department of Labor to look into the Bouzaglo’s practice of pocketing their servers’ tips.

While many corporations hire communications experts to respond to every tweet, Facebook message and online review, the wave of digital feedback can be especially challenging for small businesses with small staffs, digital consultants said.

For one thing, there is so much online content to wade through. Roughly 60 per cent of all adults get information about local businesses from search engines and entertainment websites such as Yelp or TripAdvisor, according to a 2011 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

“Customer service is a spectator sport now,” said Jay Baer, president of Convince & Convert, a social media marketing consultancy in Indiana. “It’s not about making that customer happy on Yelp. That’s the big misunderstanding of Yelp. It’s about the hundreds of thousands of people who are looking on to see how you handle it. It’s those ripples that make social media so important.”

In their “Kitchen Nightmares” episode, Amy and Samy Bouzaglo are seen yelling and cursing at customers inquiring about undercooked food or long delays. They blame online bullies.

“We stand up to them,” Amy Bouzaglo tells the camera at one point. “They come and they try to attack us and say horrible things that are not true.”

That’s exactly how businesses shouldn’t respond, the digital experts said.

“If your policy is to berate the customer online, that doesn’t create good public relations,” Garrity said.

Baer said he tells clients to create a response matrix representing different potential complaints that staff can refer to whenever bad feedback arises. Creating the comment chart before the bad publicity hits helps ensure businesses aren’t responding to angry or disappointed customers with their own anger or disappointment, Baer said.

A 2011 Harvard study found Yelp’s 40 million reviews disproportionately affect small businesses. The research found a one-star increase in Yelp’s five-star rating system resulted in a revenue jump of up to 9 per cent for some restaurants, while chains with sizable advertising budgets were unaffected.

“You have to respond 100 per cent of the time, whether you like it or not,” Baer said. “Businesses need to assign someone to stay on top of it.”

In Arizona, Amy and Samy Bouzaglo had planned a grand reopening ceremony and news conference for Tuesday, but the news conference was cancelled late Monday after legal threats from Fox.

Fewer than a dozen people were waiting when the restaurant reopened Tuesday. Four guards blocked the door and turned reporters away. Inside, a smiling Samy Bouzaglo posed for pictures and told customers that the tension captured in the episode was staged. That was a disappointment for some.

“I wanted it to be dramatic and people yelling,” said Ricky Potts, a 29-year-old blogger who ate at the restaurant for the first time Tuesday only to declare the food good and the service routine. “Basically, I wanted it to be the circus that the TV episode was.”

The Nuclear Regulation Authority said Wednesday that it agrees with experts that the fault underneath the Tsuruga No. 2 reactor poses a high risk if a major earthquake hits.

Japan prohibits reactors from sitting above active faults. Tsuruga’s No. 2 reactor faces scrapping unless its operator provides new data overriding the decision.

The case is a crucial test for the watchdog to prove whether it can resist industry pressure just as Japan’s pro-nuclear government moves to restart reactors suspended since the tsunami-caused 2011 Fukushima disaster.

Tsuruga’s operator, the Japan Atomic Power Co., has rejected the decision and will continue its own probe.

“What separates me from someone in the streets of Kabul is such a thin line,” says the Afghan-American author of “The Kite Runner” and “A Thousand Splendid Suns.” ”What I have is, in many ways, an undeserved gift.”

His amazing run continued Tuesday night as he appeared before an overflow crowd at the Barnes & Noble on Manhattan’s Union Square. With some 300 seated before him, and dozens more watching on a video screen a floor below, Hosseini spoke for around 40 minutes about his new novel, “And the Mountains Echoed.” The book, published Tuesday, will likely become one of the summer’s favourite reads. It has received admiring reviews and reached the top 10 on Amazon.com well before its official release.

Hosseini, 48, is slightly greyer since “A Thousand Splendid Suns” came out six years ago. He was relaxed and chatty Tuesday, not surprising for a man who turned up in a plaid shirt and jeans, as if dropping in on a neighbour for a weekend visit.

Like his previous novels, “And the Mountains Echoed” features Afghan characters and tells a story about families, this one spanning decades and generations. The title was inspired by a William Blake line, “And all the hills echoed,” with “hills” changed to “mountains” to suit Afghanistan’s imposing terrain. Hosseini didn’t know what the book would be called when he began it, but he did have an image in his mind that had struck him like a “thunderclap” — a man walking across the desert, pulling a wagon behind him, with a 3-year-old girl inside. A boy, around 10, trails them.

“Something about that particular dynamic and image seemed to me so striking and compelling,” he said. Determined to know more about these people he decided the children were siblings, “that they guilelessly adore each other and something difficult is going to happen” in Kabul. He would call the boy Abdullah, and the girl Pari. He would, once again, draw upon old memories of Afghanistan, a country he left as a child.

Hosseini considers the book his most ambitious, with a complex narrative and stops in Paris, San Francisco (the author lives in Northern California) and Greece. He had no idea how the novel would turn out when he started and considers it far harder to describe than “A Thousand Splendid Suns,” which he summarizes as “the struggles of women in Afghanistan over the last 30 years.” But he does know what he wanted to express — how we all are united by loss, by failure, by what we’re missing.

“Life just doesn’t care about our aspirations, or sadness,” he said. “It’s often random, and it’s often stupid and it’s often completely unexpected and the closures and the epiphanies and revelations we end up receiving from life, begrudgingly, rarely turn out to be the ones we thought (we’d have).”

Few authors have enjoyed so many nice surprises. Ten years ago, Hosseini was a doctor who had written stories all of his life but never thought anyone wanted to read them. He was a doctor because he had been poor when his family first moved to the U.S. and he never wanted to be poor again. He wrote “The Kite Runner” out of love, with no plans to publish it, only to see the novel become a word-of-mouth sensation after its 2003 release.

“I more or less stumbled into a writing career,” he said, adding that he was happy to give up medicine. (Meanwhile, he has set up a foundation that provides humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan.

Asked by an audience member which books he had been reading, he mentioned the short story writers George Saunders and Alice Munro. A woman wanted to know how Hosseini was able to get inside the minds of female characters (“I watched a lot of ‘The View,’” Hosseini responded, to much laughter. “I don’t think I ever did tap into what women think. I’m as clueless as any guy in this room.”) The inevitable question about how one becomes a writer was asked by an 8th grader.

“My advice to you is to read a lot,” he said. “And just write, write all the time.”

Officials of the Irving, Texas-based organization are scheduled to open the first of the ballots cast on whether to allow openly gay Scouts. Scouting officials propose allowing openly gay Scouts but retaining the ban on gay adult Scout leaders.

The final vote is scheduled for Thursday in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburb of Grapevine.

Some conservatives have denounced the proposal, saying the Scouts’ traditions would be undermined by the presence of openly gay youth. Gay-rights supporters have welcomed the proposed change as a positive first step but want the BSA to the ban on gay adults as well.

A local government spokeswoman said Wednesday all seven were in stable condition and a suspect had been apprehended. The knife attack took place as students were returning home Tuesday afternoon on the outskirts of the city of Maoming in the southern province of Guangdong.

Police later detained a suspect identified by the official Xinhua News Agency as a 32-year-old mentally ill man surnamed Liao.

China has suffered a series of sometimes deadly attacks on schoolchildren in recent years, many of them blamed on the mentally ill. That has highlighted what critics say is a chronic lack of screening and treatment for mental illness.