Your Friday Evening Briefing – The New York Times

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Good evening. Here’s the latest at the end of Friday.

1. Russia signaled that it may be scaling back its war aims in Ukraine.

After weeks of grinding war in which Russian forces failed to capture major cities, a senior general said that Russia would now focus on taking control of the eastern region of Donbas, where Russia-backed separatists have been fighting a war since 2014.

Col. Gen. Sergei Rudskoi said that the “first stage of the operation” had been “mainly accomplished” and that Russian forces would “be concentrated on the main thing: the complete liberation of the Donbas.”

2. President Biden arrived at Poland’s border with Ukraine, where he met with U.S. service members. Tomorrow he will meet with Ukrainian refugees.

3. Shanghai is experiencing an Omicron surge that is testing China’s “zero Covid” approach and the patience of the city’s residents.

Shanghai is seeing more than 1,500 Covid cases a day, straining hospitals and prompting lockdowns in China’s largest city, which until recently had been considered a crown jewel in the government’s strategy for fighting the pandemic.

Some residents are expressing dismay over China’s zero-tolerance approach. On Friday, anger and grief welled up online when a Shanghai hospital confirmed that a nurse who worked there had died from an asthma attack after finding the doors of its emergency department shut because of Covid restrictions.

4. Senator Joe Manchin said he would vote in support of Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, all but ensuring her confirmation.

Manchin’s crucial swing vote shows that Democrats are uniting behind Jackson after a bruising set of hearings that revealed deep opposition from Republicans.

If no Republicans vote to confirm her, Vice President Kamala Harris will be required to break a 50-50 tie to place Jackson on the court, a first in seating a Supreme Court justice. The Senate Judiciary Committee plans to vote on the nomination on April 4, and Democrats want to move it quickly to the floor.

5. Text messages between Ginni Thomas and Mark Meadows show she pressed the Trump administration to overturn the 2020 election.

Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, sent a barrage of texts to Mark Meadows, President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, according to a person with knowledge of them. One invoked a slogan of conspiracy theorists, asking Meadows to “release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down.”

The texts from Ginni Thomas, a longtime political activist on the far right, were among documents released to the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Her husband was the only member of the Supreme Court who voted against allowing the release of those records, prompting some legal experts to call on him to recuse himself from future cases.

Justice Thomas was discharged from the hospital today, after spending a week there with flu-like symptoms.

6. Israel will host a high-profile meeting of foreign ministers from the U.A.E., Bahrain, Morocco and the U.S. starting this weekend — the first gathering of its kind on Israeli soil.

The high-level meeting, unimaginable five years ago, reflects the pace at which Middle East alliances have shifted.

The foreign ministers will discuss disagreements and shared concerns about the war in Ukraine; the possibility of a new nuclear deal with Iran; and the need to avoid a surge of violence in Israel and the occupied territories next month, when important Jewish, Muslim and Christian holidays will overlap.

7. A wide stretch of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has suffered a sixth mass bleaching event.

Government scientists aerially surveyed 750 separate reefs across hundreds of miles last week, finding severe bleaching among 60 percent of the corals.

Bleaching indicates that corals are under extreme stress, often from warming water. While they can recover if temperatures cool, roughly 30 percent of the corals on the Great Barrier Reef died after the last mass bleaching, in 2016.

Corals are under increasing stress from climate change and greenhouse gas emissions, which helped make last year the hottest on record for the world’s oceans. Between 2009 and 2019, 14 percent of the world’s coral reefs was lost.

8. At the Academy Awards on Sunday night, the most-nominated movie and one of the least will face off for best picture. “The Power of the Dog” has 12 Oscar nominations and “CODA” just three.

The way the academy tallies votes favors a likable consensus choice such as “CODA” over a more polarizing one like “Power of the Dog,” which many voters found “a little too austere,” The Times’s Kyle Buchanan writes.

“CODA” won big with the actors, writers and producers guilds earlier this year, which tend to predict Oscar success, but has no nominations for editing and directing — and no such film has nabbed top honors since 1932. Netflix is spending heavily on “Power of the Dog” in an attempt to win its first best-picture Oscar.

You’ve marked your own ballot by now, haven’t you? If not, what are you waiting for?

9. A new line of wallpaper is making waves in the interior design world.

It features beautiful drawings of African Americans in lush, historical settings that rarely included them.

Created by celebrated designer Sheila Bridges, Harlem Toile de Jouy plays with the conventions of traditional toile de Jouy wallpaper, showing an 18th-century couple dancing to tunes from a boombox and correcting negative historical depictions of Black people.

Our writer Veronica Chambers has the wallpaper in her home as a reminder that “my ancestors had my back.” She traces its rich history and notes the designs have also made it onto sneakers, umbrellas and Wedgwood china.

10. And finally, the Transportation Security Administration may not be known for its sense of humor — but its Instagram account is.

The punny social media posts — regularly featured on “The Tonight Show” — are the handiwork of Janis Burl, who initially worked in airport security but took over as the T.S.A.’s social media branch manager about two years ago.

The team “posts odd finds, information about what you can and cannot bring through T.S.A., and travel-related answers to questions we may get” on a daily basis. In 2021, its page reached 54 million Instagram users.

Burl explained to The Times why she thinks her approach works: “If it takes humor to help you remember what you can and cannot do when traveling through security, then humor is what we will provide,” she said.

Have an uproarious night.

Sean Culligan compiled photos for this briefing.