Ted Cruz: Clinton hits out at senator for leaving dog as Biden to declare Texas a ‘national disaster’

She says she’ll be flying to Texas to distribute supplies.

From the White House press pool on Joe Biden’s plans to visit Texas:

“The answer is yes. The question is I had planned on visiting Texas in the middle of next week but I don’t want to be a burden. When the president lands in a city in America it has a long tail,” Biden says.

Reptiles in Oklahoma have had to resort to one of their more unusual natural instincts to survive the below-freezing temperatures sweeping the state this week.

A number of alligators in southeastern Oklahoma were caught on camera sticking their snouts out of water amid the deep freeze by the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation’s David Arbour.

The images showed lifting their snouts above the waterline with the lake having frozen all around them.

Louise Hall has more from the rest of the freezing country.

A billboard and posters blasting Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz for flying to Cancun in Mexcio as his state struggles with power outages and freezing temperatures have gone up around Texas. A truck was spotted driving around Houston with the message: "Texas froze. Ted Fled."

A smaller message below the big letters reads: "Paid for by Occupy Democrats election fund and not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee."

According to their website, Occupy Democrats is an advocacy group started in 2012 to counter the Republican Tea Party and claims to be "the largest and most active community of Democratic voters in the world".

Gustaf Kilander reports.

As press secretary Jen Psaki told the White House press pool, via Reuters:

"We’re not spending any time, energy or breath analyzing Sen Cruz’s whereabouts or his group chat."

About 6 million coronavirus vaccine doses have been delayed due to winter weather, according to White House adviser Andy Slavitt.

Slavitt told the Associated Press that the weather led to delays of shipping by three days, but that they remain safe in warehouses and wouldn’t spoil.

Freezing temperatures and unprecedented weather from Texas to the North East forced injection sites to close, with Slavitt saying 1.4 million doses shipped on Friday while the backlog would be cleared over several days.

“We as an entire nation will have to pull together to get back on track,” Slavitt told reporters at the White House coronavirus briefing.

Leaving here without comment.

Having jetted off to Cancun as his state faced its worst winter disaster in decades, Senator Ted Cruz returned with his tail between his legs – and was met with fury from all sides, writes The Independent’s Andrew Naughtie.

“Whether or not Mr Cruz actually resigns over the ill-advised holiday – which he has called a mistake – it will stain his reputation forever. But then again, his reputation has been poor for years. In fact, he is famously one of the most disliked people in Congress, and not just by the other party.”

For Independent Voices, Tom Peck writes Ted Cruz’s decision to head off for some winter sunshine in Mexico, while his voters froze to death, is just the sort of thing that politicians do.

“Whether we are even shocked by this new level of shamelessness therefore seems unlikely. Anyone who’s prepared to sod off to the sunbeds while his people endure long days and nights of total power outages and sub-zero temperatures is prepared, pretty much, to do anything. And that very much includes blaming his daughters.”

In an attempt to defend Ted Cruz for going on vacation as Texas struggled with the aftermath of Winter storm Uri, Donald Trump Jr appeared to get one important detail wrong in accusing the lawmaker’s critics of hypocrisy.

The senator for Texas is being eviscerated by the public and media after it emerged he had taken his family to Cancun, Mexico, as his constituents endured record cold temperatures with no heat, power, or water,

The eldest son of former president Donald Trump took to Twitter and hit out at “the hypocrisy of those trying to cancel Ted Cruz,” adding that their silence “on their Democrat Governor’s incompetence is telling.”

Unfortunately for Mr Trump, and as many Texans were quick to point out, Texas Governor Greg Abbott is a Republican and was chair of the Republican Governor’s Association from 2019 to 2020.

Oliver O’Connell reports.