There is a situation in the Situation Room. White House work order requests obtained by NBC News4 reveal a number of intimate details about the first family's lives in D.C. (Melania Trump requested a large screen TV, the Oval Office bathroom needed a new toilet seat), but if there is one major takeaway about managing a historic building, it's that you can't be squeamish about pests.

To start, there are the mice, which reportedly got cozy in the Situation Room and the Navy mess food hall: "Add more traps, they spotted mice run in the small and big dining rooms," one request read. Another alarming request implored someone to "PLEASE … PICK UP DEAD MOUSE," with the deceased rodent's location apparently being Vice President Mike Pence's West Wing office.

Cockroaches are also a problem at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., with at least four infestations reported in the work order requests. Then there are the ants: "Treat for ants in the West Wing 1st floor COS Office, especially the main entrance and the small office," one order said. Another simply conveyed the urgency with its all-caps "ANTS."

Trump Tower this is not. Read a sampling of the White House work orders via NBC here. Jeva Lange

Despite Sen. Joe Manchin's (D-W.Va.) promise to vote for his party's coronavirus relief bill, his and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema's (D-Ariz.) opposition to the package's $15 minimum wage hike may still sink it.

Progressives' long fight for a $15 federal minimum wage finally found its vehicle in the COVID-19 relief package currently being considered in the Senate. As it stands, the bill will raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9.50 once it's passed, and keep growing annually until it reaches $15 in 2025. But Manchin would prefer the cap to remain at $11 per hour, and Sinema doesn't think it should be in the bill at all, leaving the party at an impasse they plan to solve with help from the Senate parliamentarian, Politico reports.

The parliamentarian advises senators on the rules and procedures of the body, especially when it comes to a Reconciliation bill, which the Democrats are using to push through their relief bill without GOP support. Republicans and Democrats are planning to meet with the parliamentarian Wednesday to argue against and for the wage hike, respectively, Politico reports. The GOP says the hike will hurt small businesses struggling in the pandemic, while Manchin has argued "throwing $15 out there right now just makes it very difficult in rural America," despite the wage increase not taking full effect for years.

The impasse has Democrats considering knocking the hike to just $11 or $12/hour, Rep. John Yarmouth (D-Ky.) told Politico. Still, progressives led by Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) are standing firm, with Sanders telling reporters on Monday that "I think we're going to pass [the bill] as it is." Kathryn Krawczyk

Get ready for a burst of the common cold, Stat News reports.

In a recently published study, researchers in Hong Kong analyzed a surge in rhinovirus — one of the most common causes of the common cold — infections among students when they returned to classrooms in the fall after months of schools being shuttered. Ben Cowling, a professor of infectious diseases epidemiology at the University of Hong Kong and senior author of the study, told Stat he expects other places will experience a similar pattern as schools reopen.

The theory is that "susceptibility" to rhinoviruses may have increased because people were less exposed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequently had fewer chances to build up immunity. The "hardy" Rhinoviruses also may be more resistant to protective measures like mask-wearing and social distancing than their coronavirus and influenza counterparts, per Stat.

While the common cold is a far less serious health threat than COVID-19, the Hong Kong researchers did note that the outbreaks in the city included more severe rhinovirus infections than normally seen, with some children needing hospital care. That's prompted concern about a similar decrease in resistance to influenza leading to a "severe" flu season whenever coronavirus restrictions are significantly scaled back. Read more at Stat News. Tim O'Donnell

When demand for energy rose sharply last week in unseasonably frigid Texas, and power plants started going offline, the state Public Utility Commission (PUC) allowed wholesale electricity prices to jump to the maximum rate of $9 per kilowatt-hour, a 7,400 percent increase over the normal rate of 12 cents per kilowatt-hour, The Texas Tribune reports. "The rate hike was supposed to entice power generators to get more juice into the grid, but the astounding costs were also passed directly on to some customers."

Texas became national news because its power grid, overseen by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), nearly collapsed and 4.5 million customers lost power. But "now that the lights are back on in Texas, the state has to figure out who's going to pay for the energy crisis," Bloomberg News reports. "It will likely be ordinary Texans."

"The price tag so far: $50.6 billion, the cost of electricity sold from early Monday, when the blackouts began, to Friday morning," Bloomberg estimates. "That compares with $4.2 billion for the prior week." Texas allows energy retailers to compete for customers, and those who opted for variable-rate plans face huge bills — up to $17,000 in one case. But even utilities with fixed-rate plans "that ran up huge losses as the cost of electricity skyrocketed last week will inevitably try to recoup those through their customers, taxpayers, or bonds," Bloomberg reports.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), who appointed the PUC, said Sunday he will work with the legislature to address the huge energy bills. But the customers' pain is the energy industry's gain, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune report. After a 2014 freeze, Houston's CenterPoint Energy bragged to investors that it "benefited significantly" from high energy prices during the resulting power squeeze, adding, "To the extent that we get another polar vortex or whatever, absolutely, we'll be opportunistic and take advantage of those conditions."

Under the Texas system, power companies not only aren't required to produce enough energy to avoid blackouts, "they are incentivized to ramp up generation only when dwindling power supplies have driven up prices," ProPublica and the Tribune report. That's incentive structure is a recipe for near-misses — and blackouts, said University of Houston energy expert Ed Hirs.

It is also bad politics right now. "We cannot allow someone to exploit a market when they were the ones responsible for the dire consequences in the first place," said state Rep. Brooks Landgra (R). Peter Weber

Sen. Ted Cruz's (R-Texas) wife apparently had a mole in one of her recent group chats, and she's not happy.

The Texas senator sat down on Tuesday with the Ruthless podcast after drawing outrage for flying to Cancun with his family while Texas suffered through power outages last week. Amid the scandal, The New York Times managed to obtain texts Cruz's wife, Heidi, sent to their friends and neighbors about the trip.

"Heidi's pretty pissed at that," Cruz said of the leaked texts. "She actually was over at her neighbor's house yesterday sort of walking through [it]."

Cruz noted his wife texted their neighbors, a group that includes both Republicans and Democrats, and he decried the texts leaking to the media as an example of the "ridiculously politicized and nasty" climate, adding, "Here's a suggestion: just don't be a--holes. Just treat each other as human beings."

The text messages obtained by the Times revealed how quickly Cruz's widely-panned trip to Cancun came together amid the crisis in Texas, with the senator's wife texting that her house was "FREEZING" and asking, "Anyone can or want to leave for the week? We may go to Cancun." The Times noted the messages were "provided to The New York Times and confirmed by a second person on the thread, who declined to be identified because of the private nature of the texts." Kwame Anthony Appiah, The New York Times Magazine's "in-house ethicist," told the Times the situation "strikes me as a pretty substantial breach of norms about confidentiality."

Cruz, who has since expressed regret over his trip to Cancun, didn't say on the podcast whether he's figured out who was behind the leak, though one can only presume a full, possibly years-long investigation is underway. Brendan Morrow

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) finally found a place colder than last week's Texas freeze — and the reception he got from Texans after returning from his truncated Mexican vacation, The Late Show imagined Monday night.

"Following the backlash over his trip to Cancun, Sen. Ted Cruz spent the weekend trying his best to help the people of Texas," Jimmy Fallon said at The Tonight Show. But his "photo op didn't work out too well. Most people just drove away when he tried showing them his vacation photos." But "Cruz tried to be helpful in other ways," he said. "Later he showed Texans how to make frozen margs with the snow in their living rooms."

"Sorry, Cruz," but "doing the literal bare minimum for the sake of the cameras" at this point "is the politician version of coming home with flowers the day after Valentine's Day," Trevor Noah said at The Daily Show. "It's not nothing, but your a-- is still sleeping on the couch."

"Every detail that comes out of this story is more Ted Cruzier than the last one," like that he invited his college roommate on the family vacation he blamed on his daughters, Stephen Colbert said at The Late Show. And "it gets worse, because after Cruz returned we found out he left his dog behind."

Also, former President Donald Trump finally lost his tax return battle, and "given the potential charges, the former president could be sent to jail if convicted," Colbert said. "I can't wait to see it all play out in the new Netflix series Orange Is the New Orange."

Once New York prosecutors get Trump's tax returns, "we'll finally have the evidence we need to lock Hillary up — or something like that," Jimmy Kimmel joked at Kimmel Live. "Life is funny, isn't it? One day you're building walls, the next they're closing in on you." And the Ted Cruz story "is only getting funnier," he said. "Only Ted Cruz would think he can repair his image by touching a maskless constituent two days after getting off an international flight."

"United Airlines announced over the weekend that they launched an investigation into who leaked data about Sen. Ted Cruz's travel itinerary amid media coverage of his trip to Cancun, Seth Meyers said at Late Night. "They're trying to figure out who would have a motive, and they narrowed it down to everybody." Peter Weber

Facebook said Tuesday it will end its week-long blockade of Australian news sites after reaching agreement with the Australian government on a pending law that forces Facebook and Google to pay news providers for their content. "Facebook has refriended Australia, and Australian news will be restored to the Facebook platform," Treasurer Josh Frydenberg told reporters on Tuesday.

Frydenberg said after tough negotiations with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, the Australian government will introduce four amendments to its News Media Bargaining Code legislation, giving Facebook and Google, among other things, more time to reach agreement with news providers before a government arbitration panel steps in with a binding deal. The new code would prevent Facebook, Google, and eventually other Big Tech companies from using their digital dominance to strong-arm news businesses into take-it-or-leave-it compensation deals.

"Going forward, the government has clarified we will retain the ability to decide if news appears on Facebook so that we won't automatically be subject to a forced negotiation," Facebook's head of global news partnerships, Campbell Brown, said in a statement. Frydenberg said Australia's fight with Facebook had been a "proxy battle for the world," as other countries consider similar measures. Nobody is sure how Australia's new law, once enacted, will work in practice. Australian lawmakers will begin debating the amendments on Tuesday.

Google, after first threatening to pull its search engine from Australia, changed course and started reaching deals with Australian news publishers. Its deal with News Corp, which has a dominant presence in Australia, is global in scope. Facebook's news ban initially also blocked Australian government sites with COVID-19, public health, and emergency services, sparking widespread outrage in the country. Peter Weber