The Dutch parliament has voted to approve a ban on kosher and halal slaughter, after intense lobbying by animal rights groups.

An Oxford student has been removed from her position on the Board of Deputies after she wrote an article calling for a ban on circumcision.

New West End Synagogue, a United Synagogue congregation, revoked Rebecca Steinfeld's seat at the Board as an under-35s observer after she referred to circumcision as "male genital mutilation" in an article she co-authored in the Guardian last week.

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The Conservative MEP accused of discrimination after he made new attempts to label kosher meat has withdrawn the plan.

Struan Stevenson, who represents Scotland in the European Parliament, has pulled an amendment to the food information bill calling for kosher meat to be labelled "this product comes from an animal slaughtered by the shechitah method", and the equivalent for halal.

Actress Brigitte Bardot has launched a campaign to ban the religious slaughter of animals in France.

Ms Bardot, along with six other animal rights groups, aims to put up more than 2,000 posters encouraging the government to outlaw both the Jewish practice of shechitah and the Muslim method, halal, of killing animals.

The posters include a graphic image of a cow’s head.

Ms Bardot, 76, wants religious slaughter to be replaced “to prevent animals suffering."

The campaign to save the slaughter of kosher meat in the UK has passed another hurdle after European ministers today passed draft legislation which will not introduce controversial labelling.

This morning, the European Council of Ministers approved a draft of new food information regulation. The draft did not include amendment 205, which called for all meat products derived from animals slaughtered by shechitah to be labelled "meat from slaughter without stunning".

The Jewish community in New Zealand is celebrating after the country’s ban on kosher poultry was overturned.

An agreement has been reached with the minister of agriculture which will enable the shechitah of poultry to continue, but the community is still negotiating over the slaughter of lamb .

In May, Agriculture Minister David Carter rejected a recommendation that shechitah be exempt from the new animal welfare code, which mandates that all commercially slaughtered animals must first be stunned, making shechitah illegal.