The Leaders UK: All the best of the UK editorial pages, all in one place.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and US President Barack Obama, who are expected to sign a nuclear reduction treaty today..

The Telegraph: US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev are expected to sign the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, better known as START, today. It’s a good start, pun intended, The Telegraph claimed today, but “we still have a long way to go before the threat of nuclear war has been totally eradicated.”

The Telegraph also used its editorial page to write a pithy, if somewhat incoherent, piece on the rise in ferret ownership outside of Yorkshire. The editorial seems to be saying that the news that ferrets are now more popular in southeast England – Essex – than in their previous home, in the north of the country, isn’t really news at all. Everyone likes a ferret?

The Times: Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s claim that business leaders have been “deceived” by the Conservatives on the proposed national insurance contribution rise is both logically incoherent and suicidally dangerous, The Times said. And raising the national insurance contribution, rather than VAT, targets businesses at a fragile time for the British economy. Said The Times, “Making needless enemies of business leaders was the sort of old Labour indulgence that Mr Brown himself forced his party to abandon.”

The Guardian: “Within a short space of time, the relationship between President Hamid Karzai and his US and UN backers has plummeted,” The Guardian wrote. Karzai is not proving to be a dependable ally in Afghanistan, however you read his recent “capitulation” in the sacking of two ostensibly corrupt electoral commission officials. “US troops are finding themselves fighting on two fronts – against the Taliban and to mitigate the worst aspects of the government they are shoring up,” the paper concluded. “The only long-term solution, apart from ceasing the military campaign, is to let the Afghan people decide who they want to lead them.”

The Independent: Today’s expected signing of the START is “the most promising development for many years in what used to be called superpower relations,” the paper wrote. But clouding that sunny image of a brave new future is the eruption of violence in Kyrgyzstan – yesterday, the country’s interior minister was murdered, while troops shot and killed at least a dozen demonstrators in the capital of Bishkek. “So, even as we seek to build on the positive changes that presage a safer world, a wary eye needs to be kept on the turmoil that may already be brewing further south,” The Independent concluded.

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