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The Prudential insurance firm has just announced it is axing some 2,000 staff – nearly 20 percent of its entire British workforce. I work in one of the Prudential call centres in Reading. Most of those who are being sacked are "field staff". These are the people who visit policy holders in their own homes and deal with individual cases. They are all being done away with.

Up to 16,000 engineers working for ADT, Britain's largest fire and security company, have this week voted to suspend their strike action. The workers have been taking a series of four-day strikes over a pay claim. The strikes have disrupted ADT's out of hours service, and managers have been forced to staff local offices.

Workers in the GMB union at Glasgow airport are to be balloted over strike action in protest over the sacking of a union representative. GMB Scottish secretary Robert Parker said, "GMB Scotland believes that British Airways (BA) set up our member. "BA needs to be aware that we will take whatever action to reinstate the sacked union rep."

RAGE led the local TV news in Birmingham last week! RAGE is the vibrant local campaign against the Labour council's criminal plan to privatise 30 elderly care homes across Britain's second biggest city. Over 50 people took over the pelican crossing outside the Normanhust home last week. The mood was fantastic. People were chanting "People not profit. Save our homes," and held banners saying, "Labour has betrayed the elderly."

One of the most exciting developments of the new anti-capitalist movement is how it has brought together all sorts of people with differing views about how to change the world. This has been seen most recently in Britain with the Globalise Resistance counter-conference tour. Environmentalists, socialists, anarchists and many others have come together to discuss how to take on the power of the corporations.

Jazz: The History of America's Music is a moving book with stunning photographs. It accompanies a documentary series that has already wowed the US and will be shown in Britain later this year. The increased sales of jazz records in the US have been credited to the power of the series.

Anti-incinerator campaigns Over 60 people packed into an angry meeting against the expansion of Britain's largest incinerator, in Edmonton, north London. The expansion is part of a national programme of 122 proposed new incineration sites.

The cost of childcare has soared under New Labour to an average of £6,000 a year. A survey by the reputable Daycare Trust released this week found that a typical nursery place for a two year old now costs £110 a week. That's £30 a week more than in 1997 when New Labour was elected. In London the typical cost is now £135 a week, putting childcare "out of many parents' reach", says the trust. At the same time many councils are also cutting back on nursery places. The facts make a nonsense of the government's claims to have put working families with childcare at the centre of its policies.

Royal Mail workers across Britain are voting on the latest pay deal. After months of negotiations, management and union leaders have agreed a 3.2 percent increase.

The mood in Luton last Saturday summed up how many workers in Britain feel today. Everyone in the town feels gutted by General Motors' decision to close the Vauxhall plant, but at the same time people want resistance. Over 10,000 car workers, local people and other trade unionists marched through Luton last Saturday.

These Victorian slums in Poplar, east London, capture the image many of us have of the time in the 19th century when Britain was most divided between rich and poor. But those who live in the same streets today face the same level of inequality as their Victorian predecessors.

The case of the "internet twins" has provoked cries of outrage from politicians and press alike. The tabloid press have portrayed the Kilshaws, the British couple who bought the six month old twin girls on the internet for £8,200, as eccentric and unfit parents. The twins' biological mother has been called "shameful" and "grasping". The Kilshaws may not be particularly appetising people. He is a well-off solicitor and belongs to a far right fragment, the Democratic Party. But most people who are desperate for children are not like this. The same politicians and newspapers that have been in uproar over the "internet twins" have helped create a situation that drives such people to