Prospect's Tuesday morning news roundup

Poor standards of care in 14 hospitals with England's highest death rates are to be castigated in a report to be released later today. The investigation, led by Professor Sir Bruce Keogh, has looked into whether the figures suggest sustained failings in the quality of care from each of the hospital trusts. All of them had higher than expected death rates from 2010-2012. The report was ordered by the government after the publication of the Francis Inquiry into the Stafford Hospital scandal, following worries that failing hospitals were not being properly held to account.

UK defence secretary Philip Hammond has said it would be "reckless" not to have a like-for-like replacement of the country's Trident nuclear weapons system. This public intervention again highlights the disagreement between his department and coalition partners the Liberal Democrats, who have launched their own review into alternatives for Trident replacement. The party has said that the existing system was designed for the Cold War era.

Field Marshall Lord Edwin Bramall, who was chief of the defence staff from 1982-85, has written for Prospect on the need, as he sees it, to scrap Trident. Read his argument here.

Spain's prime minister Mariano Rajoy rejected calls to step down yesterday, after a former treasurer of the governing People's Party, Luis Bárcenas, claimed in court that he was the author of documents alleging that the premier received corrupt payments from a slush fund.

The documents, leaked to the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, suggest that the party had kept a secret set of books recording undercover payments to senior party figures, including Rajoy. The country's leader has hit out, saying that text messages between him and Bárcenas, published in the same newspaper on Sunday were attempts to blackmail him.

Mexican security forces announced that they had captured the leader of the country's most infamous and brutal drug cartel. A government spokesman said that marines had arrested Miguel Angel Trevino, head of the Zetas cartel in an early-morning raid, after intercepting his pickup truck a few miles from his home in Nuevo Laredo on the US border.