Age Discrimination - Your expereinces

I am trying to make some sense of the age discrimination laws and how employers are dealing with them. Any experiences would be welcome. I am finding vastly different approaches in areas such as:

• retirement age
• applications to extend working life and reactions
• pensions
• employee insurance
• experience based pay increases
• blocks on training courses
• refusal to consider younger applications job as well as older ones

In fact anything. I will feed back my findings and, hopefully, give a little guidance on keeping out of trouble.