Regeneration in the newspapers: UK's first infrastructure bank?

Civil servants are putting together proposals that would allow pension funds to bankroll the building of motorways and power stations through a special state-controlled bank, the Times reports. The Treasury and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills hope to have plans far enough advanced for the chancellor, Alistair Darling, to make an announcement in the Budget on Britain’s first infrastructure bank, according to the newspaper.

Higher education minister David Lammy has told universities to compensate for a future dearth of government funding by bidding aggressively for the billions of dollars that US President Barack Obama has pledged for research, the Financial Times reports. But senior university figures are sceptical about Lammy's view that they could rely increasingly on overseas income sources, the paper writes.

The Independent investigates the case of Denis O’Connor, a 64-year-old man with a mental age of 10 who was subjected to years of antisocial behaviour. It asks if nothing more could have been done to protect him.

London has lost its crown as the pre-eminent home of business and finance, the Financial Times reports. New York fares better than London for business environment, availability of people and infrastructure according to a new index of global financial centres, the newspaper says.

Virgin Media is to take its fibre cables above ground for the first time in a move that the company says could bring superfast broadband to 1 million homes in hard-to-reach rural areas, the Independent reports. Meanwhile, in their own technology manifesto, the Conservatives have promised access to broadband internet with a speed of 100 megabits per second to most Britons.

Homeowners and rural campaigners say they will fight the high-speed rail network from London to Birmingham and the North that would knock down some 440 homes, the Daily Telegraph reports.

The Independent’s Susie Rushton asks if "identikit coffee shops and mid-market fashion outlets" are what make Portobello market London’s fifth most-visited tourist attraction. "Of course not", Rushton answers. But myopic developers don't see it that way. Neither can the protesters attempting to stop the modernisation of Portobello Road see past their own self-interest; they talk of preserving 'retail ecology', but tourists and shoppers don't clamour to W11 out of a moral duty to support independent traders. They go because it's trendy. Or, rather, it was."