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Earlier this week, Palestinian President Abbas finalized a deal with his Hamas rivals to form a unity government in the occupied territories. Bernard Avishai reads the agreement as a sign of how much ground Hamas has lost:

Tuesday’s reunification agreement suggests one of two things. The first is that Abbas—who is seventy-nine and concerned about his legacy after Kerry’s unsuccessful nine-month initiative to broker peace—has decided to get out in front of the mounting anger in the Palestinian street about the failure of the talks and adopt something like Hamas’s harder line. The second is that Abbas simply has beaten Hamas at its own game, forcing it to recognize his authority and to accept his nonviolent, internationalist strategy. Both conclusions may be true to some degree, though most Israelis impulsively jump to the first. Which is truer?

“Abbas has not knocked out Hamas, but he is winning on points—he has the opportunity to extend the umbrella of nonviolence to Gaza,” Mohammad Mustafa, the Deputy Prime Minister responsible for the economy, told me in Ramallah. A central player in both the old and new Palestinian governments, Mustafa, a former World Bank official, is also the head of the billion-dollar Palestine Investment Fund. “This is an agreement for real,” he went on. “Hamas’s situation has changed. The biggest factor is regional—especially Egypt. Hamas lost their alliance with Syria some time ago. But they had alternatives. Morsi”—Mohamed Morsi, the deposed Egyptian President—“made them feel comfortable. Tunisia, Turkey was a big ally, Iran was coming their way. Now there aren’t really many friends for Hamas.” He added that the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt had “convinced Hamas that they really lost.”

But Efraim Inbar considers it a coup for the Gaza-based militants:

Despite the current “unity” discourse, the Palestinians remain as divided as before. The only true test for “unity” of a political entity is monopoly over the use of force.

As long as the military branch of Hamas remains independent, there is no unity; just evidence of the “Somalization” of Palestinian politics. Islamic Jihad also remains fiercely independent in Gaza, as well as other jihadist organizations. In fact, under the current accord, instead of the PA regaining lost Gaza, Hamas is gaining better access to the West Bank. …

In fact, it is hard to believe that Hamas will give up control over the Gaza Strip. The de facto statehood which Hamas enjoys is good business, as it allows for the extraction of taxes and fees. In addition, it serves the extremist Hamas ideology that demands building Islamist political structures and keeping alive the military and theological struggle against the unacceptable Jewish state. Hamas has made it clear that it has not mellowed one bit on this issue. It also hopes to get a better foothold in the West Bank to fortify its role in Palestinian society. Hamas seeks to emulate the road taken by Hizballah in gaining political hegemony in Lebanon while maintaining a military force independent of the central government.

But Sheera Frenkel reports that the US may have been holding back-channel talks with Hamas for months, indicating that the group has made more concessions to peace in private than it would dare to do in public:

“Our administration needed to hear from them that this unity government would move toward democratic elections, and toward a more peaceful resolution with the entire region,” said one U.S. official familiar with the talks. He spoke on condition of anonymity, as the U.S, government’s official stance is that it has not, and will not, talk to Hamas until certain preconditions are met. “It was important to have that line of communication,” the U.S. official said.

State Department deputy spokesman Marie Harf denied the talks. “These assertions are completely untrue,” Harf told BuzzFeed. “There is no such back channel. Our position on Hamas has not changed.”

Previous Dish on the unification deal here and here.

An Ohio Republican is trying to limit women’s access to long-term birth control. Elizabeth Nolan Brown ridicules his reasoning:

The first hearing for House Bill 351, sponsored by Cincinnati Republican Rep. John Becker, was held yesterday. At the hearing, Becker said insurance plans should be barred from covering IUDs because preventing the implantation of a fertilized egg—which IUDs could theoretically do, though they primarily work by preventing sperm from getting to that egg in the first place—could be considered abortion. “This is just a personal view. I’m not a medical doctor,” he added.

Sound policy reasoning there, Rep! Becker also acknowledged the wording of the bill could be interpreted to ban coverage of birth control pills, too, but he hadn’t intended it that way. He’s not a medical doctor, remember, just someone trying to play one with the weight of the state behind him. Under H.B. 351, all insurance plans in Ohio would be barred from offering abortion coverage. This isn’t a ban on “taxpayer funded abortions” we’re talking about—it’s an explicit restriction on the kinds of legal services that private insurance companies (and by extension, employers who offer health plans) can offer. Conservatives decry this sort of thing vociferously when it’s Obama making every insurance company and employer cover certain services.

German Lopez illustrates the bill’s folly with the above chart: 

The bill, in other words, attempts to stop women, particularly low-income women, from using one of the most effective, practical forms of birth control.

The only exemption in the bill is for ectopic pregnancies, which could threaten the life of the mother. Pregnancies involving rape, incest, and other life-threatening circumstances would not be exempted. Becker’s bill isn’t the first time Ohio’s Republican-controlled legislature has moved to restrict abortions. In the latest state budget, Republicans approved a slew of measures that will, among other things, allow state officials to more easily shut down abortion clinics.

Tara Culp-Ressler highlights the impact the bill would have on poor women in particular:

The unintended pregnancy rate for women living below the poverty level is more than five times as high than the rate for the women in the highest income level, largely because they struggle to access affordable birth control. Since long-lasting forms of birth control like the IUD remain effective for years without the need to take a daily pill or a monthly shot, public health experts recommend them for women who struggle with avoiding pregnancy. But IUDs are expensive, and can cost as much as $1,000 upfront. A large 2012 study focusing on low-income women in St. Louis found that when cost barriers to IUDs are removed, more women choose them and fewer women end up needing abortions.

Jennifer Senior warns that our gadget dependency both deprives us of sleep and encourages absent-minded eating:

It’s already fairly well established that people consume more food when watching television. Recently, researchers at the University of Bristol found the same among those who eat in front of their computers, though their sample was small and the design of their study was a bit eccentric (they fed 44 subjects the same meals at lunchtime; those who ate while playing computer solitaire were apt to eat twice as many cookies 30 minutes later as those who ate far from a glowing screen). The theory, whether it’s television or a desktop: You remember eating when you’ve made a separate activity out of it; you don’t if you’re doing something else, and therefore misgauge your appetite.

Yet it’s increasingly difficult for Americans to unplug.

Last winter, The Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine reported that nine out of ten of us use a technological device in the hour before bed. (In 60 percent of those cases, it’s the TV, but that’s in aggregate; for Americans under 30, it’s cell phones, which the researchers deemed much more disruptive.) According to a Pew study from 2010, 65 percent of Americans sleep with their cell phones on or next to their beds (for people 18–29, that number jumps 90 percent.) And in 2012, a poll by Harris Interactive found that 54 percent of Americans look at their phones while lying in bed.

None of which is to say that curtailing email and Facebook and Twitter use will make us lose ten pounds. But it cannot hurt, at the very least, and reminds us that all of our cells, be they inside our bodies or in the palms of our hands, could use a good rest.

Stephen Walt thinks so:

First, he has put the idea of a further NATO expansion on the back burner for a long time, and maybe forever. Russia has opposed NATO’s march eastward ever since it began in the mid-1990s, but Russia was not in a position to do much about it. The brief 2008 war between Russia and Georgia was Putin’s first attempt to draw a red line, and that minor skirmish dampened enthusiasm for expansion considerably. This time around, Putin made it abundantly clear that any future attempt to bring Ukraine into NATO or even into EU membership will be met with firm Russian opposition and will probably lead to dismemberment of the country.

Second, Putin has restored Russian control over Crimea, an act that was popular with most Crimean residents and most Russians as well. The takeover entailed some short-term costs (including some rather mild economic sanctions), but it also solidified Russian control over its naval base in Sevastopol and will allow Russia to claim oil and gas reserves in the Black Sea that may be worth trillions of dollars. … Third, Putin has reminded Ukraine’s leaders that he has many ways to make their lives difficult. No matter what their own inclinations may be, it is therefore in their interest to maintain at least a cordial relationship with Moscow. And Ukraine’s new president, Petro Poroshenko, got the message.

Posner also disputes the theory, advanced by Tom Friedman, that Putin “blinked” after weighing the costs of the Ukrainian adventure against the benefits for his regime:

Russia’s economy was not weakened–the stock market was trading in the 1400s before the crisis and is trading in the 1400s today. The ruble is roughly unchanged, a hair lower. No one really knows whether China got a bargain or not; too much depends on unknown contingencies. But it is clear that Russia has benefited from closer relations with China. NATO hardly seems revived, the European countries are in turmoil and divided in their response to Russia, and as dependent on its gas as ever. Defense spending is not likely to increase, but even if it did, Russia would hardly care since it has no plans to invade Poland or Germany, and knows that they have no plans to liberate Crimea or provide military aid to Ukraine.

Against these trivial costs if that is what they are, consider Russia’s gains. … Saying that Putin “blinked” is like saying that the boy who stole a cookie from a cookie jar blinked because he took only one cookie rather than all of them.

Meanwhile, the conflict itself continues apace, and Russian involvement has by no means ended. Anna Nemtsova reports that the rebels in eastern Ukraine have taken over a border town, opening a supply corridor with Russia:

What this means is that even as Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with senior European leaders on Thursday and he and U.S. President Barack Obama circle each other warily during the D-Day commemoration in Normandy on Friday, the war in eastern Ukraine may be moving into high gear. Although Putin has withdrawn most of the Russian troops that had been poised on the frontier threatening a conventional invasion, the way is now open for volunteers and operatives of various stripes, along with supplies, to move freely into the country.

A couple of journalistic colleagues and I had been hearing about attempts to open this corridor for several days as we traveled in eastern Ukraine. The Russian ministry of foreign affairs, Russian parliament parliamentarians and the Russian volunteers in Ukraine we spoke to all talked about establishing what they called a “humanitarian corridor.” We had been looking for the hole in the border, and we discovered it Wednesday near a city called Sverdlovsk in the region of Luhansk.

(Photo: Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images)

Data discrepancies afflict around 2 million Obamacare enrollments:

The biggest concern is that some people may have received too high a subsidy, meaning they’d be asked to repay the excess or lose their coverage.

Obama administration officials said they believed most of the inconsistencies will be cleared up over the summer, but said they’d developed a system to “turn off” benefits for people who aren’t eligible. “The fact that a consumer has an inconsistency on their application does not mean there is a problem on their enrollment,” Julie Bataille, the Department of Health and Human Services’ spokeswoman said. “Most of the time what that means is that there is more up-to-date information that they need to provide to us.”

Philip Klein is alarmed:

2.1 million represents a lot of sign-ups. Even if a “vast majority” of instances are easily resolved, that could still leave hundreds of thousands of cases in which individuals received incorrect subsidy determinations. If individuals received extra subsidy money, it would mean that they would have to pay it back in the following tax year. A higher-than-expected tax liability could become a mess for lower-income Americans who budgeted for the year based on certain assumptions.

Cohn is less concerned:

The idea is to verify applicant information, in real-time. And mostly that’s what happened during open enrollment, at least once all of the consumer websites were working. But because the process is so complicated—and because people’s life circumstances sometimes change—the information that people supplied didn’t always match up with federal records. That was particularly true for income, since the data hub checked applications against (two-year-old) tax returns and (one-year-old) payroll stubs. Somebody who recently lost a job or got a new one, or went through a major life change like a divorce, or whose income simply varies a lot from year to year, could easily supply income information that was totally accurate but simultaneously at odds with the government’s latest data.

The Affordable Care Act anticipates situations like these and addresses them. Rather than hold up those applications, creating a huge backlog and potentially scaring away people seeking insurance, Section 1411 of the law allows applicants to complete the enrollment process even if the information they submit doesn’t match up properly. In such cases, people may “attest” to the accuracy of the information they provided. If the data mismatch is about citizenship or residency—or if it is about income and of greater value than 10 percent—these people receive official notices, requiring them to provide new information or show that the original, submitted information is correct.

In an interview on Tuesday, former Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford let loose with harsh criticism:

Ford, who served from 2010 to 2014, basically thinks that Obama was warned that Syria was going to hell, and did nothing to stop it.  “We have been unable to address either the root causes of the conflict in terms of the fighting on the ground and the balance on the ground, and we have a growing extremism threat,” the ambassador said. “We warned even as long as two years ago that terrorist groups” would take advantage of the chaos in Syria to build a base of operations — a warning that, of course, turned out to be correct.

He also doesn’t see the deal removing most of Syria’s chemical weapons as making up for…much of anything, really. “There really is nothing we can point to that’s been very successful in our policy except the removal of about ninety-three percent of some of Assad’s chemical materials. But now he’s using chlorine gas against his opponents.” According to Ford, the State Department believed “as much as two years ago” that the US needed to give much stronger support to friendly, non-extremist Syrian rebels. Support the right guys, the argument goes, and the terrorism problem doesn’t loom so large.

Greg Scoblete takes down Ford’s argument for arming the “right” Syrian rebels:

Ford blithely brushed off the question of how the U.S. would ensure custody of those weapons by assuring us that the U.S. government had “information on reliable groups” whose “agenda was compatible with our national security interests.” Of course, even if the U.S. did have a finely tuned understanding of various rebel groups and how they would act if they were to receive large shipments of U.S. weapons (a skill that Washington has curiously failed to manifest elsewhere) this is hardly the only argument against arming factions in Syria’s civil war.

A more serious objection is that backing one side to “victory” does nothing more than implicate the U.S. in the creation of yet-another failed state. Ford, and those cheering him on, have a [surprisingly] naive faith in the power of Syria’s rebel groups to not only depose Assad but to stand up a relatively cohesive and secure state in his wake. Where is this faith coming from? It couldn’t be from Iraq or Libya, where the U.S. directly and indirectly toppled regimes only to see chaos flower in the aftermath. The U.S. directly implanted a government in Afghanistan at the cost of billions of dollars and is now leaving the country at the mercy of a still-potent insurgency.

Larison piles on:

Ford unintentionally draws attention to some of the main reasons why it has never made sense to arm any part of the Syrian opposition. First, there is no such thing as a truly “reliable” group in these conflicts. No matter how agreeable a group’s stated agenda and ideology may appear, the U.S. gains no meaningful influence and control over the groups that it arms, and it cannot rely on these groups to do anything except pursue their own goals. In the short term, that may seem expedient because they claim to have similar goals, but that guarantees nothing later on. The main problem isn’t that the U.S. lacks information about the groups requesting weapons, though it might, but that it doesn’t know what will happen if it succeeds in promoting regime change by proxy.

But Walter Russell Mead agrees with Ford that Obama’s reluctance to intervene in Syria has created international security problems:

Twelve thousand foreign fighters, 3,000 of whom come from Western nations, have entered Syria as jihadists since the war began. The prospect of experienced terrorists with Western passports, native accents, and ties to local communities returning home to the United States and Europe presents a daunting security challenge. … The Soufan Group, an international intelligence and security firm, offered a stark warning this weekend that, as a result of the Syrian war, al-Qaeda “is probably in a better position now than at anytime since October 2001.” On Tuesday, Bashar al-Assad held sham elections that sent a clear signal to the world that he was bound and determined to remain in power. Ford is just the latest of many Washington figures, professional as well as political, Democrat as well as Republican, to decry the President’s weakness in response to the ever-worsening crisis. Will he now act? Can he?

Beinart weighs Ford’s views alongside the similar argument that Vali Nasr makes in his book, The Dispensable Nation:

The Ford-Nasr critique is hardly self-evident. Nasr assails the White House staff for putting domestic politics too much at the center of foreign policy. But Obama’s refusal to take bigger foreign-policy gambles may reflect an accurate assessment of the domestic mood. (It’s noteworthy that the one time Obama did take a big overseas risk—the raid on Osama bin Laden—it was in pursuit of a goal Americans truly cared about). …

Either way, the Ford-Nasr critique deserves more attention because it’s the one most likely to influence Hillary Clinton, who was more supportive of arming Syria’s rebels than Obama, more supportive of a larger Afghan surge and, according to Nasr, more supportive of talks with the Taliban earlier on in the conflict. Intellectually, Clinton has been more influenced by the Balkan Wars than Obama has, and less by the trauma in Iraq. And her self-declared doctrine—“smart power”—which envisages the coordinated use of different aspects of American might, is closer to what Ford and Nasr are proposing than to the Obama Doctrine: “Don’t do stupid shit.”

Keating observes that China’s tightly enforced collective amnesia about Tiananmen Square doesn’t extend to Hong Kong:

In contrast to the tense silence on the mainland, the commemoration of Tiananmen was very much in evidence in Hong Kong, where as many as 150,000 people attended a candlelight vigil [yesterday].  … Hong Kong is currently undergoing the dual and seemingly contradictory processes of becoming more closely integrated with mainland China while theoretically transitioning toward having a fully elected democratic government. But China and Hong Kong together aren’t just “one country, two systems”—another favorite slogan—they seem to be one country with two memories, and two very different understandings of recent history.

In addition to the regularly scheduled vigil, Rachel Lu reports on a smaller, more politically charged event that also took place in the city yesterday:

The organizers of the new gathering — two groups called Civic Passion and the Proletariat Political Institute — claim to espouse a complete rejection of the Chinese Communist Party and its rule, rather than holding out hope for reconciliation, reform, or redress of past wrongs. The large banner hoisted on the stage read in Chinese: “Don’t Need [Chinese Government] to Redress June 4” and “Want the Demise of the Communist Regime.” The new gathering only turned out a small fraction of the attendance at its storied counterpart in Victoria Park. The organizers claimed more than 7,000 were present, but police estimated approximately 3,060.

Simon Denyer visits Hong Kong’s new Tiananmen Square museum:

In a tiny fifth floor room in an office building in Kowloon, Hong Kong, a museum was set up in April to commemorate the events of June 4, 1989, better known by some as “Tiananmen Square.” It has already already attracted about 6,000 visitors since it opened. Only a few dozen people can fit into the 800-square-foot exhibition space at a time, but by the end of Wednesday, about 400 visitors had come. Johnny Li, a 26-year-old staff member, said about 40 to 50 percent of visitors come from mainland China. “Some are surprised because they didn’t know the history of June 4, but some already know, and share and discuss with other people in the museum,” he said.

Simon Denyer points out that the anniversary comes at a time when Hong Kong’s ties to the mainland are severely strained:

Under the terms of the territory’s handover from British rule in 1997, China promised significant autonomy under the “one country, two systems” model. At the time, many here were happy to see the British go, but that sentiment has since gradually eroded. China has promised the territory universal suffrage and genuine democracy in 2017, when the job of chief executive, the most powerful political role in Hong Kong, next comes up for grabs.

But many here fear that Beijing will fix the contest, to ensure one of its local allies wins. There are also growing concerns that China is gradually diluting Hong Kong’s cherished civil liberties and media freedom, while a massive influx of tourists and immigrants from mainland China has caused growing local resentment. The resentment undermines any hope Beijing might have of persuading the people of Taiwan to ever join mainland China under a similar “one country, two systems” model, and it is a constant reminder of a democratic spirit among Chinese people that refuses to go away.