Petition launched to halt mass ceremony that organisers say is for 100 orphans whose parents were killed by gangs

Human rights activists in Nigeria have launched a petition to stop a plan to push 100 girls and young women into marriage in a mass ceremony, which has caused outrage in the west African country.

The plan, sponsored by Abdulmalik Sarkindaji, the speaker of the national assembly in the largely Muslim north-western state of Niger, were criticised by Nigeria’s women’s affairs minister, Uju Kennedy Ohanenye. She said she would seek a court injunction to stop the ceremony next week and establish if any of the girls were minors.

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© Photograph: Kola Sulaimon/AFP/Getty Images

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© Photograph: Kola Sulaimon/AFP/Getty Images

Rescue and reform manifesto from Early Education and Childcare Coalition calls for overhaul of model

A manifesto calling for an overhaul of childcare provision in England, including making early education accessible to all children regardless of whether their parents work or not, has been backed by dozens of leading employers and unions.

Thirty-five national organisations have joined forces to call for the reform of the current childcare model, including the Federation of Small Businesses, the Early Years Alliance, the Fawcett Society, Joseph Rowntree Trust and the National Children’s Bureau.

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© Photograph: Stuart Boulton/Alamy

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© Photograph: Stuart Boulton/Alamy

Family law has not kept up with social shifts, with marital rape, child marriage and lack of property and custody rights persistent problems, research finds

Discriminatory family laws across parts of Africa are stalling progress on women’s rights in some countries, according to new research.

The human rights organisation Equality Now studied family law and practices in 20 African countries and found progress in recent decades, but said inequalities persisted in marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance and property laws.

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© Photograph: Nardus Engelbrecht/AP

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© Photograph: Nardus Engelbrecht/AP

A solution that is only a solution for the people who can afford to be a part of the solution is not a solution A hour long video about cooking, food, race, gender, class and capitalism.

"The term might be unsettling, but we believe it is appropriate. Pick up any business textbook and you will never see the history of the past thirty years described this way. A title like Thomas Davenport's Big Data at Work spends more than two hundred pages celebrating the continuous extraction of data from every aspect of the contemporary workplace, without once mentioning the implications for those workers. EdTech platforms and the tech giants like Microsoft that service them talk endlessly about the personalisation of the educational experience, without ever noting the huge informational power that accrues to them in the process." (Today's colonial "data grab" is deepening global inequalities, LSE)

The book: Data Grab - The new Colonialism of Big Tech and how to fight back (Penguin) Interview with the authors: Q and A with Nick Couldry and Ulises A Mejias on Data Grab

Homeownership is not the boon to older Americans that it once was.

© Kelly Burgess for The New York Times