BREAKING NEWS: Activists from East London Chicken Save (ELCS) and Animal Rebellion have ‘locked on’ outside London’s last remaining slaughterhouse, Kedassia in Hackney Wick, stopping it from operating.

VOICES: The vegan-friendly Burger King in London has been open for a week now and the hype is very real. But what many plant-based fans forget is that Leicester Square has been the venue for countless outreach actions over the years. So what do some of the local animal rights activists think about it?

POSITIVE NEWS: Power to the people, or rather power to the vegans! The Vegan Land Movement (VLM) has revealed that its latest crowdfunded land buy-out actually blocked the plans of two chicken farmers, one of whom was looking to build a facility with a turnaround of an estimated 20,000 birds per year.

NEWS: On Tuesday, the Scrap Factory Farming campaign (SFF) went to court to ask a judge to grant a judicial review into the government’s failure to consider evidence that keeping animals in intensive farming conditions is a serious risk for the emergence of new zoonotic diseases and antibiotic resistance. Today, the judge refused to grant the review. SFF plans to appeal the decision.

A new animation narrated by Chris Packham and released by the campaign group Keep the Ban aims to raise awareness of so-called ‘trail hunting’, exposed last year by hunt saboteurs as a subterfuge for illegal fox hunting in the UK.

Famed scientist Jane Goodall and Animal Save Movement are among those to amplify calls to end farm animal gifting to people in developing countries via charities such as Oxfam, World Vision and Christian Aid. But farmer critics have accused activists of playing ‘grinch’ this Christmas.

ANALYSIS: According to researchers, attempting to convince people not to eat meat too judgmentally could be counterproductive because they actually ‘care too much’ about animals, forcing them to use various methods to escape the uncomfortable truth. Can knowing this make us better activists?

The refusal to grant a ULEZ exemption to charity Dogs On The Street could have serious implications not just for dogs, but for their homeless guardians too, writes Claire Hamlett.

Universities and places of higher education have always been hotbeds of progressive thinking and a place where people of all ages can broaden their horizons. The Surge Campus Rep Programme supports students who want to reach out to their contemporaries and raise awareness of the reality of what humans do to animals.

Why do supermarkets spend so much money on their marketing campaigns? Why does not a single supermarket advert show the daily life of a chicken on an intensive farm, where 95 per cent of all their chickens come from?

OPINION: At a time when campaigners and activists are looking for ever more impactful and imaginative types of action to get a message across, what place do marches still have? Surge writer Claire Hamlett shares her thoughts having attended her first animal rights march at the weekend.

The US city of Berkeley in California has sent one of the strongest signals yet that the disproportionate impact of animal agriculture on the environment is being recognised, by becoming the first US city to set a plan to one day only spend public money on plant-based foods.