Latest news with #Burris
Business Wire
24-07-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
Fears Law Partners Named to 2025 Lawdragon X – The Next Generation List
DALLAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Fears Law partners Brice Burris, Avani Javia and Jeremy Ayer have been named to the 2025 Lawdragon X – The Next Generation guide, a prestigious recognition honoring attorneys with less than 15 years' experience who are making a significant impact on the future of law. In its third edition, the guide describes this year's honorees as 'multitalented, dedicated, focused - and the best argument there is for the vitality of the law no matter what your particular take on it.' 'We never stop working to ensure our clients receive the best legal representation,' said Bryan Fears, founder of Fears Law. 'I'm proud of our team and look forward to what they will accomplish in the future.' Mr. Burris has been honored for his work in plaintiffs' personal injury cases, particularly in automotive accident cases. He played a key role in securing a $166 million verdict, believed to be the largest intentional tort jury verdict of 2018 in Texas, in a wrongful death case involving insurance fraud. Mr. Burris has also been named to the Texas Super Lawyers Rising Stars list and Best Lawyers: Ones to Watch. Ms. Javia received recognition for expertise in business law, estate planning, and Employee Retention Credit (ERC). As a partner at Fears Law, she excels at guiding clients through complex legal matters and brings extensive experience with the intersection of law and technology. As managing attorney of the firm's pre-litigation division, Mr. Ayer was recognized for his work in plaintiffs' personal injury cases. Known for securing favorable settlements, he has also been named to the Lawdragon 500 Leading Plaintiff Consumer Lawyers guide, Best Lawyers: Ones to Watch and National Trial Lawyers Top 100 list. View the entire guide here: About Fears Law: Fears Law is a multi-state law firm dedicated to delivering results-driven legal services in personal injury, business law, and estate planning. With a client-first approach and a team of award-winning attorneys, Fears Law provides trusted representation to individuals, families, and businesses. For more information, visit
USA Today
14-07-2025
- Sport
- USA Today
Former Notre Dame All-American Jeff Burris enshrined in Walter Camp's ‘Ring of Honor'
It was quite the career for former Notre Dame All-American cornerback Jeff Burris, and on Sunday he got even more recognition from the Walter Camp Football Foundation. As a consensus All-American in 1993, Burris went on the be the No. 27th overall pick of the first-round of the 1994 NFL draft by the Buffalo Bills, and had a solid career as a professional. Following his playing career that ended in 2004, he took a break before returning to the gridiron as a coach. Burris would then work his way up the ladder very quickly, becoming the Miami Dolphins assistant defensive backs coach just two years after starting the profession. He was on the Irish coaching staff in 2016 as a defensive analyst, before leaving after a season to return to being a position coach once again. Entering this coming season, he is the cornerbacks coach for the New York Giants. Burris played in 144 total games with 19 interceptions and 536 total tackles. Adding in his 10 touchdowns scores as the primary back in Notre Dame's goal line package, Burris has had an impressive career as he has now been enshrined into the foundations 'Ring of Honor.' Burris was one of six people to earn the honor in 2025, as we congratulate him on this amazing accomplishment.
Yahoo
18-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Kansas City restaurants gear up for World Cup surge — and this time, they're ready
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Kansas City has seen big events before, but restaurants often got left hungry for profits. This time, with one organization leading the charge, they're cooking up a different story. They started planning as early as last year. Jackson County short-term rental owners concerned ahead of World Cup 2026 But here's the bigger deal: restaurants aren't just hoping fans will drop by. They're strategically placing their brands front and center to make sure success isn't left to chance. 'In 26 days with all six of these events that come through from June to mid-July, it's not even the whole month and we'll have visitors that are greater than the population of Kansas City,' said Mike Burris, the executive director of Greater Kansas City Restaurant Association. Burris said not being ready for that kind of crowd isn't an option. He's making sure his members rise to the occasion — not simply react to it. 'You're going to have to be nimble – that's the word I keep using – you have to be nimble because it's going to change from the first two teams that get here to those last two teams,' he said. That's why last year, Burris got to work — determined not to repeat what happened during the NFL Draft, when many local businesses missed out on the boom. Ribbon cutting to take place for Margaritaville Hotel Kansas City He and his team invested in geo-fencing software to help restaurants connect with hungry fans searching for food — and boost their marketing game. But it didn't stop there. They're rolling out interpretation guides, tipping explanations for international visitors, and plenty more to make sure no opportunity goes unclaimed. 'You're on the world stage so obviously want to put your best foot forward – but ultimately starting to plan now,' Tyler Banker said. Banker, the director of Front-of-House Operations for the Summit Hospitality Group — which owns Third Street Social, Summit Grill, Pearl Tavern, and more — knows just how important those lessons are. He's got a plan: from beefing up staff to educating customers, they're not leaving anything to chance. And now, restaurant owners have a little extra help — this time from the Missouri Legislature. Lawmakers passed a bill that would let businesses stay open 23 hours a day and sell liquor throughout the World Cup. The bill, which is now on the governor's desk and expected to be signed, would lift restrictions on when alcohol can be sold — impacting bars, restaurants, and liquor stores alike. Back to the Greater Kansas City Restaurant Association – they're even assisting with the little things. COMPLETE COVERAGE: Kansas City hosting 2026 World Cup matches For example — the average time a local spends in a dine-in restaurant is about 45 minutes. International travelers? Closer to an hour and a half. That means table turnover will be slower — and patience will be key. Bottom line: Burris says give these businesses a little grace — it's going to be a busy ride. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Yahoo
‘Ghost' students are hijacking millions from colleges—and locking real human students out of classes
Scammers disguised as thousands of fake students are flooding colleges across the U.S. with enrollment applications. The 'students' are registering under stolen or fabricated identities, getting accepted to schools, and then vanishing with financial aid and college-minted email addresses that give the fraudsters a veneer of legitimacy. Dr. Jeannie Kim went to sleep thinking about budgets and enrollment challenges. She woke up to discover her college had been invaded by an army of phantom students. 'When we got hit in the fall, we got hit hard,' Kim, president of California's Santiago Canyon College, told Fortune. 'They were occupying our waitlists and they were in our classrooms as if they were real humans—and then our real students were saying they couldn't get into the classes they needed.' Kim worked quickly to bring in an AI firm to help protect the college and strengthen its guardrails, she said. Santiago Canyon wound up dropping more than 10,000 enrollments representing thousands of students who were not really students, said Kim. By spring 2025, ghost student enrollments had dropped from 14,000 since the start of the spring term to fewer than 3,000. Across America's community colleges and universities, sophisticated criminal networks are using AI to deploy thousands of 'synthetic' or 'ghost' students—sometimes in the dead of night—to attack colleges. The hordes are cramming themselves into registration portals to enroll and illegally apply for financial aid. The ghost students then occupy seats meant for real students—and have even resorted to handing in homework just to hold out long enough to siphon millions in financial aid before disappearing. The scope of the ghost-student plague is staggering. Jordan Burris, vice president at identity-verification firm Socure and former chief of staff in the White House's Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer, told Fortune more than half the students registering for classes at some schools have been found to be illegitimate. Among Socure's client base, between 20% to 60% of student applicants are ghosts. 'Imagine a world where 20% of the student population are fraudulent,' said Burris. 'That's the reality of the scale.' At one college, more than 400 different financial-aid applications could be tracked back to a handful of recycled phone numbers. 'It was a digital poltergeist effectively haunting the school's enrollment system,' said Burris. The scheme has also proven incredibly lucrative. According to a Department of Education advisory, about $90 million in aid was doled out to ineligible students, the DOE analysis revealed, and some $30 million was traced to dead people whose identities were used to enroll in classes. The issue has become so dire, the DOE announced this month that it had found nearly 150,000 suspect identities in federal student-aid forms and is now requiring higher-ed institutions to validate the identities of first-time applicants for Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) forms. 'Every dollar stolen by a ghost is a dollar denied to a real student attempting to change their life,' Burris explained. 'That's a misallocation of public capital we really can't afford.' The strikes tend to unfold in the quiet evening hours when campuses are asleep, and with surgical precision, explained Laqwacia Simpkins, CEO of AMSimpkins & Associates, an edtech firm that works with colleges and universities to verify student identities with a fraud-detection platform called SAFE. Bryce Pustos, director of administrative systems at Chaffey Community College, recalled last fall's enrollment period when faculty members reported going to bed with zero students registered for classes and waking up to find a full class and a mile-long waitlist. Michael Fink, Chaffey's chief technology officer, said the attacks took place at scale and within minutes. 'We'll see things like 50 applications coming in within two seconds and then somebody enrolling in all 36 seats in a class within the first minute,' Fink told Fortune. Simpkins told Fortune the scammers have learned to strike on vulnerable days on the academic calendar, around holidays, enrollment deadlines, culmination, or at the start or end of term when staff are already stretched thin or systems are more loosely monitored. 'They push through hundreds and thousands of records at the same time and overwhelm the staff,' Simpkins said. Plus, enrollment workers and faculty are just that, noted Simpkins; they're educators who aren't trained in detecting fraud. Their remit is focused on access and ensuring real students can get into the classes they need, she added, not policing fraud and fake students who are trying to trick their way to illicit financial gain. That aspect also makes the institutions more vulnerable to harm, said Simpkins. 'These are people who are admissions counselors who process applications and want to be able to admit students and give everybody an equal chance at an education,' she said. Sadly, professors have dealt with cruel whiplash from the attacks, noted John Van Weeren, vice president of higher education at IT consulting firm Voyatek. 'One of the professors was so excited their class was full, never before being 100% occupied, and thought they might need to open a second section,' recalled Van Weeren. 'When we worked with them as the first week of class was ongoing, we found out they were not real people.' In a nightmare twist, community and technical colleges are seen as low-hanging fruit for this fraud scheme precisely because of how they've been designed to serve and engage with local communities and the public with as few barriers to entry as possible. Community colleges are often required to accept every eligible student and typically don't charge fees for applying. While financial-aid fraud isn't at all new, the fraud rings themselves have evolved from pandemic-era cash grabs and boogeyman in their mom's basement, said Burris. 'There is an acceleration due to the proliferation of these automated technologies,' he said. 'These are organized criminal enterprises—fraud rings—that are coming both from within the U.S., but also internationally.' Maurice Simpkins, president and co-founder of AMSimpkins, says he has identified international fraud rings operating out of Japan, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nairobi, Kenya that have repeatedly targeted U.S. colleges. The attacks specifically zero in on coursework that maximizes financial-aid eligibility, said Mike McCandless, vice president of student services at Merced College. Social sciences and online-only classes with large numbers of students that allow for as many credits or units as possible are often choice picks, he said. For the spring semester, Merced booted about half of the 15,000 initial registrations that were fraudulent. Among the next tranche of about 7,500, some 20% were caught and removed from classes, freeing up space for real students. In addition to financial theft, the ghost student epidemic is causing real students to get locked out of classes they need to graduate. Oftentimes, students have planned their work or child-care schedule around classes they intend to take—and getting locked out has led to a cascade of impediments. 'When you have fraudulent people taking up seats in classes, you have actual students who need to take those classes who can't now, and it's a barrier,' said Pustos. The scheme continues to evolve, however, requiring constant changes to the algorithms schools are using to detect ghost students and prevent them from applying for financial aid—making the problem all the more explosive. Multiple school officials and cybersecurity experts interviewed by Fortune were reluctant to disclose the current signs of ghost students, for fear of the scheme further iterating. In the past 18 months, schools blocked thousands of bot applicants because they originated from the same mailing address; had hundreds of similar emails with a single-digit difference, or had phone numbers and email addresses that were created moments before applying for registration. Maurice Simpkins noted an uptick this year in the use of American stolen identities as more schools have engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the fraud rings. He's seen college graduates who have had their identities stolen get re-enrolled at their former university, or have had their former education email address used to enroll at another institution. Scammers are also using bizarre-looking short-term and disposable email addresses to register for classes in a 10-minute period before they can get their hands on a .edu email address, said Simpkins. That verified email address is 'like a gold bar,' Simpkins explained. The fraudster then appears legitimate going forward and is eligible for student discounts on hardware, software, and can use the college's cloud storage. 'We had a school that reached out to us because some fraudsters ordered some computers and devices and other materials and then had them delivered overseas,' said Simpkins. 'And they did it using an account with the school's .edu email address.' McCandless said initially it was easy to tell if a fake student was disguised as a local applicant because their IP address was generated overseas. But just a few semesters later, IP addresses were local. When the college's tech team looked deeper, they would find the address was from an abandoned building or somewhere in the middle of Lake Merced. Every time the school did something to lock out fraudulent applicants, the scammers would learn and tweak, McCandless said. The school's system is now designed to block ghost applicants right out of the gate and at multiple stages before they start enrolling in classes. McCandless said professors are assigning students homework for the first day of class, but the ghost students are completing the assignments with AI. Faculty have caught the fake homework, however, by noticing that half the class handed in identical work, or detecting the use of ChatGPT, for instance. 'They're very innovative, very good at what they do,' said McCandless. 'I just think the consistency with which they continue to learn and improve—it's a multimillion-dollar scheme, there's money there, why wouldn't you invest in it?' According to the DOE, the rate of financial fraud through stolen identities has reached a level that 'imperils the federal student assistance programs under Title IV of the Higher Education Act.' In a statement, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said the new temporary fix will help prevent identity theft fraud. 'When rampant fraud is taking aid away from eligible students, disrupting the operations of colleges, and ripping off taxpayers, we have a responsibility to act,' said McMahon. Ultimately, what schools are trying to do is put in place hurdles that make it unappealing for scammers to attack because they have to do more front-end work to make the fraud scheme efficient, explained Jesse Gonzalez, assistant vice chancellor of IT services at Rancho Santiago. However, the schools are attempting to balance the delicate issue of accepting everyone eligible and remaining open to vulnerable or undocumented students, he said. 'The more barriers you put in place, the more you're going to impact students and it's usually the students who need the most help.' Dr. Kim from Santiago Canyon College fears too many measures in place to root out fraud could make it more difficult for students and members of the community—who for various reasons might have a new email, phone number, or address—to access education and other resources that can help them improve their lives. 'Our ability to provide that democratic education to those that would not otherwise have access is at stake and it's in jeopardy because of these bad actors turning our system into their own piggy banks,' said Kim. 'We have to continue to figure out ways to keep them out so the students can have those rightful seats—and keep it open access.' This story was originally featured on
Yahoo
05-06-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
When the baby is in the NICU, who's caring for the mom? A new model is changing that
When a newborn lands in the NICU, all eyes turn to the tiniest patient in the room. But what happens to the person still recovering from labor and delivery—especially if they're battling physical complications or mental health challenges while sitting beside an incubator? Dr. Heather Burris, a neonatologist and senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI), noticed a disturbing pattern. 'In my job, I encounter parents choosing to stay with their babies in the NICU instead of seeking their own health care,' she said. Even when a mother has a potentially serious condition like postpartum hypertension or a surgical site infection, 'they must leave their baby's bedside and go to the closest emergency room, requiring separation from their baby to get care.' It's a gap in postpartum care that's hiding in plain sight. Related: 5 reasons why NICU parents might be more susceptible to depression and anxiety My daughter was born six weeks early and spent 10 days in the NICU. Even though her condition was stable, that stretch of time remains one of the most harrowing experiences of my life. There is nothing that can prepare you for seeing your tiny baby hooked up to machines helping them breathe—a vivid reminder of how fragile new life can be. In the days that followed her birth, I was battling more than exhaustion. I experienced symptoms of postpartum PTSD, but no one seemed to notice—not my loved ones, and not my medical team. I kept showing up at her bedside, putting on a brave face, even as I felt myself unraveling inside. Looking back, I wish one of the nurses or doctors had asked how I was doing, not just how she was. It might have saved me months of silent suffering. Related: When my youngest daughter was in the NICU, I felt like I was failing both of my kids A new randomized controlled trial, published in American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology Maternal-Fetal Medicine on May 5, 2025, is reimagining how care is delivered to these parents—by embedding it right where they are. The Postpartum Care in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (PeliCaN) model brings doulas and nurse-midwives directly into the NICU, helping mothers access the care they urgently need without leaving their baby's side. 'Several of our control participants never had their blood pressure checked after they left the hospital after giving birth, even though they had telehealth visits,' Burris noted. In contrast, the 20 parents who received the PeliCaN intervention got care a median of 20 days earlier than the control group. They were also far less likely to miss vital components of postpartum care, like blood pressure checks. The doulas—deployed within the first week postpartum—offered both emotional and physical support. 'Doulas interact with mothers at least once in person, and follow up via phone, text, and video chat,' Burris explained. 'They help mothers overcome barriers to postpartum care.' That support made a meaningful difference. While nearly all study participants eventually received some form of postpartum care, Burris emphasized, '30% of controls were missing a core component of postpartum care, most often blood pressure measurements in the setting of telehealth visits.' Related: 5 ways I became a better labor & delivery nurse by being a NICU mama And in some cases, the intervention may have been life-saving. 'We found severe hypertension even in mothers who hadn't had hypertension before. Other mothers shared suicidal ideation requiring immediate intervention. I truly believe that doulas can be lifesaving.' What's next for maternal care innovationScaling this model will take time, training, and policy support—but Burris and her team are hopeful. Integrating maternal care into NICUs isn't just about convenience; it's about survival, dignity, and supporting mothers as whole people, not just caregivers. 'Her baby was in the NICU—but no one was checking on her.' That may soon change. Sources: LDI Blog Post: 'Parents of Hospitalized Infants Often Neglect Their Own Health Care' American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology Maternal-Fetal Medicine, May 2025 Publication Direct quotes from Dr. Heather Burris via LDI interview, June 4, 2025
