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*Clarification appended

The Texas Supreme Court on Friday upheld the states ban on direct corporate campaign contributions, denying a challenge fromaTea Party group that called it unconstitutional.

In the unanimous opinion, Texas highest civil court also upheld state requirements that campaigns report contributions and expenditures, and ruled that private groups can sue over alleged violations.

The long-running case highlighted the tension between the warp and weft of First Amendment rights and state powers to regulate elections, Justice Eva Guzman wrote in her majority opinion.

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In 2010, the Texas Democratic Partysued Houston-based King Street Patriots, accusing the Tea Party-backed group that trained poll watchers of 1960s style intimidation during voting. Democrats called the group a sham domestic nonprofit corporation used to funnel support to Republican candidates, andalleged the group violated state campaign finance laws by illegally accepting and spending political contributions that it failed to disclose.

King Street Patriots, which called itself a group of concerned residents from the Houston area, countered that it formed to provide education and awareness [to] the general public on important civic and patriotic duties. It denied being a political committee bound by Texas election law and denied making political contributions or expenditures. Further, the group filed a countersuit challenging a slate of state campaign finance laws, calling them an unconstitutional assault on the right of political association.

On Friday, the Supreme Court resolved the broadest questions in the case, upholding the state's ban on corporate contributions, laws creating disclosure requirements and the right to sue over alleged violations as constitutional.

The King Street Patriots sought to further upend Texas election laws in the wake of a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling known as Citizens United that removed state and federal restrictions on how much corporations and unions can spend in campaigns but left intact restrictions on direct donations to candidates.

In her opinion, Guzman noted Citizens Unitedleft intact a previous Texas Supreme Court decision that called laws barring corporate political contributions consistent with the First Amendment.

Our role is simply to 'say what the law is,' not prognosticate how the law could change, Guzman wrote.

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Chad Dunn, an attorney for the stateDemocratic Party, called the ruling "an important victory."

Secret money in politics is corrosive to our democracy, which the Texas Legislature recognized decades ago," he said.There are a lot of political organizations out there that frankly have just flaunted disclosure rules under the belief that they werent constitutional. Folks should now understand that disclosure of campaign funds is the law.

Some questions in the case remained unresolved Friday, such as the Tea Party group's narrower challenge to the state's definition of a political committee.

The justices ruled that King Street Patriots was not a "political committee" under Texas law, based upon the "limited record" before the court, a determination that could change if Democrats presented more evidence.

The record is silent as to whether those donating to King Street Patriots do so with the intent that their donations be used to defray officeholder expenses or used in connection with a measure or a campaign for elective office, Guzman wrote. Nor is there evidence that King Street Patriots has a principal purpose of accepting such contributions.

Catherine Engelbrecht, who founded King Street Patriots and a separate group called True The Vote, said Friday she needed more time to digest the ruling before commenting.

Clarification: This story has been updated to more fully explain a piece of the court's opinion dealing with the state's definition of a political committee.

Read related Tribune coverage:

Houston-area Rep. Ron Reynolds, who's been sued by the state after not filing a campaign finance report in a year, says he's started a payment plan. [link]

The Texas Ethics Commission fined Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller a total of $2,750 to resolve two complaints accusing him of improper campaign accounting. [link]

Commissioners are trying to open so-called campaign in a box disclosures, where candidates report their spending on consultants but not on the specific campaign services those consultants are providing. [link]

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Texas Supreme Court rejects Tea Party challenge to campaign finance laws - Texas Tribune

Ukrainian authorities arrested two men that it claims are Russian security agentsoff theBlack Sea coastafter the pairapparentlygot lost at sea in a tiny boat duringa training exercise in Crimea, seized from Ukraine by Russia in 2014.

The men, who were washed ashore in Ukraine's Kherson region,claimed to beagents of Russia'sFederal Security Bureau(FSB) who had been deployed in Crimea, where they were taking part in a training drill,the head of Ukraines border police, Viktor Nazarenko, announced on Facebook.

Read More: Why Ukraines president met Trump before first ever meeting with Putin

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Russia has not yet commented publicly on the arrest but hascontacted Ukrainian authorities to confirm the men were FSB patrol guards, Ukraines border guard spokesman Oleg Slobodyan told the local112 channel. The two men have been jailed for 15 days.

It is not the first time Russian security or military officials have arrived unannounced in Ukraine under suspicious circumstances.

Last November Ukrainian forces near the border with Crimea announced the arrest of another pair of Russian servicemen, though Russia denied the charges and said the pair were abducted from Crimea.

Detentions of Russian soldiers have also been reported in the war-torn Donbass regionin eastern Ukraine.

Earlier this week BBC reported that Ukrainian forces detained a Russian soldier fighting in eastern Ukraine. Russias Ministry of Defense issued a statement to state news agency RIA Novosti on Wednesday, confirming the man was a former soldier but had quit in 2016, before travelling to fight in Ukraine as a volunteer.

Russia denies sending any soldiers to prop up separatist militants in eastern Ukraine and when Russian servicemen have been captured fighting alongside separatist militants Moscow has disowned the soldiers, claiming they were no longer active servicemen.

The largest incursion happened when 10 Russian paratroopers landed onto Ukrainian-held land in Donbass. Once again denying that the group were meant to land on separatist-held land as reinforcements, Russias explanation was that the men were training nearby and entered Ukraine by accident.

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Russian Agents Detained in Ukraine After Getting 'Lost at Sea' During Crimea Training Exercise, Says Kiev - Newsweek

Problems piling up.

There are few better windows into how Russia and Ukraine compare today than garbage collection. Major cities in both countries are having trouble with waste disposal, but the political fallout is markedly different between the two -- one an authoritarian state and the other a messy, corrupt democracy.

The former Soviet Union wasn't concerned with recycling or even burning garbage: When you control one-sixth of the world's dry land, there is plenty of space to bury or simplydump trash. Separating garbage, as it's done in Europe and, to a lesser extent, in the U.S. has been half-heartedly tried and abandoned many times because of poor uptake and the impossibility of enforcement.

Ukraine has had a separate collection law since 2013, but it's being ignored. Only1 percentof the country's garbage is incinerated and a further 4 percent recycled. By contrast, Sweden -- one of the global leaders in garbage treatment -- recycles or burns99 percentof its household waste. At least 4 percent of Ukraine'sterritory is reportedly occupied with 6,000 legal and 30,000 illegal dumps, according to the Ukrainian business news portal Delo.

In Russia, Yuri Trutnev, then-environment minister,saidin 2011 that creating dumps was more economically efficient than trying to incinerate or recycle trash. The following year, the country's environmental agencyreportedthat incineration was a better idea than recycling.

Russia is vast, and in many regions, there's still plenty of room for dumps and landfills.But one of Russia's many economic curses is its centralization: Moscow keeps growing uncontrollably. According to the Moscow region's government, which runs the suburbs but not the city itself, the capital's environs nowaccumulate20 percent of the country's trash, and the refuse output grows some 2.5 percent a year. The 5 percent of trash that isn't dumped is mostly burned, not recycled. No wonder people living in the capital city's close vicinity are starting, quite literally, to smell that something's wrong.

Thestench is similar in Russia and Ukraine; both of them need to invest in waste treatment technology and to clean up the dumps. But political reactionsto the miasma present a sharp contrast.

In Ukraine, Andriy Sadovy, the popular mayor of Lviv, the biggest city in the country's staunchly pro-European west, has been waging a garbage war with the central government in Kiev. Since a fire at the city's main dump last yearkilledthree first responders, the city has been forced to stop using the 82-acre site. Sadovy has begged other regions to take Lviv's waste, buthundredsof towns have refused.

Sadovy has accused the central government in Kiev of running a "garbage blockade" of Lviv as a revenge for his political party's decision to quit the governing coalition in 2016. Prime Minister Volodymyr Hroisman has denied this, accusing Sadovy of incompetence and politicking. President Petro Poroshenko, Hroisman's political patron, has blamedthe mayor for"literally burying Ukraine's most beautiful European city in trash."

As the politicians wrangled, garbage accumulation threatened to become catastrophic.Lviv's economy is tourism-based, and Sadovy has largely managed to keep mountains of refuse from building up in the city's quaint historic center, built under the Habsburgs. But in some residential areas, waste hasn't been collected for weeks, breeding rats and a fearof epidemics.

On Thursday, a temporary solution wasreached: Sadovy agreed to pay the surrounding region, run by a Poroshenko appointee, to lease a parcel of land for two years so that waste could be dumped there. Sadovy now promises to run a "zero waste" program in the city and make sure recycling plants are built. Whether he can keep those promises, or whether the waste will bury his rumored chances at the presidency, remains to be seen: Sadovy's resources and power are limited even compared with the cash-starved central government.

Russia lacks Ukraine's lively political scene. It has President Vladimir Putin instead. During his latest annualcall-in showwith voters on June 15, he was shown footage of the Moscow region's biggest dump, located right next to a residential area in the town of Balashikha. The residents petitioned the president for the dump's closure, complaining that they regularly felt sick and vomited because of gas eruptions from the mountains of waste. Putin promised to "try to do something."

Such a televised promise never goes to waste. Andrei Vorobyev, the governor of the Moscowregion immediately drove to Balashikha and promised to close the dump by 2019. But at a government meeting a weeklater, Putin remembered his promise. "Listen to me," he said, "and I want Vorobyev to hear me: You have a month to close that dump."

It was closed the following day, and the mayor of Balashikha resigned four days later. In less than a weak, the area was cleaned up; the authorities now plan a ski park there. The waste was taken to the region's other dumps, which are also receiving the tons of refuse that Balashikha used to get from Moscow every day. That strains their own capacity; the mayor of Mozhaisk, one of the towns forced to take the garbage, said the local dump would now be full in 18 months. It's a temporary solution, like in Lviv; like the Ukrainian city, the Moscow region also hasbig waste treatment plans, including the construction of several incineration plants and a separate collection scheme meant to train locals to sort garbage into "dry" and "wet." Anything more sophisticated would be doomed to failure.

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Neither Ukraine's chaotic democracy-like system or Russia's autocracy have found a lasting fix to a problem that originates in their shared Communist past. The countries can only achieve permanent change ifthose who live in them become educated about the value of recycling and alter their ways. It starts withsimple things like separate containers for paper, plastic, glass and biological waste. Once those actions are part of life, like in Europe, it'll be clear that progress is being made. But that requires a public information campaign that so far the politicians seem unlikely to wage.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story: Leonid Bershidsky at lbershidsky@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Therese Raphael at traphael4@bloomberg.net

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To Compare Russia and Ukraine, Look in the Trash - Bloomberg

Mexico has never won a knockout game in either of the two global soccer tournaments put on by FIFA, the World Cup and the Confederations Cup, when that tournament was notstaged on its home soil.

El Tri won its only World Cup round of 16 game in 1986, when it hosted. And it managed to win the 1999 Confederations Cup when it came to Mexico, claiming a semifinal victory over the United States in extra-time, and then outlasting Brazil 4-3 in a slugfest final. When Mexico put on the World Cup in 1970, it stumbled in the quarterfinal, which was the first knockout game then.

On Thursday, it kept the ignominious streak going with a 4-1 defeat to Germany in the semifinal of the Confederations Cup in Russia. Leon Goretzkas goals in the sixth and eighth minutes doomed Juan Carlos Osorios team to a ninth straight lost knockout round game in an intercontinental tournament on foreign soil. Timo Werner and Amin Younes made things worse in the second half, rendering Marco Fabians blast from distance fairly meaningless.

So Germany advanced to Sundays final against Chile, which is aiming to lift a trophy in a third consecutive summer, after claiming the 2015 Copa America and the 2016 Copa America Centenario. Die Mannschaft may think twice about the implications of winning, however. Because the defending world champions must know that no team has won the World Cup after taking the Confederations Cup home the summer prior.

As for Mexico, its disappointment will be exacerbated by the knowledge that this was Germanys B-team. Manager Jogi Loew left his first string at home, opting to use the tournament to test out younger and fringe players who might fill out his World Cup roster next summer.

This will once again call into question Osorios position in charge of Mexico. When El Tri was hammered 7-0 by Chile in the quarterfinals of the Copa America last summer, he only just clung on. He has a strong record in qualifying and this was just the Colombians second competitive loss. Yet his is one of the most closely scrutinized jobs in international soccer.

This might be the blow that does the American-educated Osorio in. If confidence has eroded that he might get his team to that elusive fifth game at the World Cup next summer, his days are surely numbered.

It didnt take long for Germany to decide Thursdays game and possibly Osorios fate. In the sixth minute, Goretzka made a trailing run, found space at the edge of the box and cleanly one-timed the ball behind Guillermo Ochoa:

Within another two minutes, Goretzka was dispatched through the line and beat Ochoa one-on-one:

Mexico finally woke up after Werner almost made it three but was denied point-blank by Ochoa. And for much of the way, El Tri was actually the more dangerous side. Giovani Dos Santos and Javier Hernandez had credible chances, but neither could breach Marc-Andre Ter Stegens goal.

Mexico dominated possession to the tune of 70 percent at some points and outshot the Germans 24-12 in an end-to-end affair, but before it would finally get on the scoreboard, Werner had scored his third goal of the tournament. Before the hour, Jonas Hector was played through, and he found the wide-open Werner beside him for the simple tap-in:

Raul Jimenez headed off the bar for Mexico and Rafa Marquez failed to score on two promising headers of his own. So by the time Fabian scored with a dazzling long shot from a free kick in the 90th minute, it was far too little and much too late.

Besides, Younes was gifted a simple fourth goal in injury timeon another pitiless German exploitation of Mexicos undermanned three-person backline.

Even Germanys reserves are capable of winning a major(ish) international tournament. And in Mexico, the inquisition over its failures in the key games begins anew.

More from Yahoo Sports:

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a Yahoo Sports soccer columnist. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.

More soccer coverage from FC Yahoo: Chile outlasts Portugal in PKs to reach Confed Cup final A favorite is refusing to emerge in Russia this summer FIFA shamelessly releases report on World Cup bidding corruption

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Mexico gets knocked out ... again. By German B-team in Confederations Cup this time - Yahoo Sports

Now, the current and former president are carrying out the nastiest public dispute in modern presidential history, one that began on deeply personal terms and which now plays out nearly every time Trump finds a policy he dislikes or a perceived double standard.

And then there's his baseless accusation that Obama ordered wiretapping at Trump Tower, a charge he never fully explained and which he's not yet retracted.

"He was very nice to me but after that we've had some difficulties," Trump said nonchalantly to a CBS interviewer last month. "So it doesn't matter. Words are less important to me than deeds. You saw what happened with surveillance, and everybody saw what happened with surveillance."

In fact, few people saw what happened, at least in the way Trump described it. The accusation, which sources said annoyed the former president, was the moment it became clear to those in both Trump and Obama's spheres that a functional relationship -- which past presidents have long cherished with one another -- was not in the offing.

"He hasn't let up the entire time," bemoaned one former Obama White House official, who said Trump was merely attempting to distract from is own woes by directing attention at his predecessor.

"He operates by making people his enemy," said the official, who spoke anonymously to describe the relationship between the two presidents. "If it deflects the focus from being on him, that's a win for him."

Presidents don't always get along with their successors. Differences in temperament and ideology usually accompany a handoff of power -- the country, it turns out, is often looking for something new when electing a commander in chief.

Herbert Hoover dismissed Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs, including Social Security, as "Fascist regimentation," a loaded charge in 1935.

Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower sniped at each other for the entire limousine ride from the White House to the US Capitol ahead of Eisenhower's inauguration, a sour episode that only unraveled further when Truman called Eisenhower a "coward" as he was leaving office (the men later reconciled at John F. Kennedy's funeral).

And Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter battled over who caused the 1982 recession -- a dispute that prompted Carter to publicly accuse his successor of not accepting the full duties of the job.

"When he is ready to accept those responsibilities, I'll be there to help him," Carter said.

In recent times, presidents have largely kept any disagreements between themselves quiet. Obama often bemoaned the state of the economy that George W. Bush left behind, but never attacked his predecessor personally. And while there remained some frostiness between Bush and Bill Clinton -- the man who defeated his father in 1992 -- the men eventually found ways to partner on global relief efforts.

"There have been instances in the past where the current president and a former president do not get along at all," said Timothy Naftali, a historian at New York University who formerly served as director of the Richard Nixon presidential library.

"What's different this time is that the two are showing it. That the animosity is so clear, and of course it's more clear on the part of President Trump, but it can be inferred from the actions of President Obama," he said.

Sources close to Trump say he remains in a competitive stance against Obama, who campaigned heavily for Hillary Clinton in last year's presidential election and offered withering criticism of Trump on the campaign trail.

Obama himself did not ease matters when, at the end of December, he suggested in an interview with his former senior adviser David Axelrod that he could have beaten Trump if he was running for president again. The boast infuriated Trump, according to a person familiar with his reaction.

One administration official said Trump is deeply sensitive to unfavorable comparisons between the pace of his presidency and Obama's. And he has eyed with deep skepticism Obama's emerging presence on the global political stage, where Trump feels increasingly isolated while some western leaders -- including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau -- align themselves in public with Obama in his post-presidency.

Obama's aides, meanwhile, say their boss treated Trump with respect during the transition period, but that a deep relationship between the two was never likely.

"He treated him as his successor and offered candid advice and perspective on a range of issues," said one former White House official. "But Trump never struck him as a particularly deep or intellectually curious guy. We are seeing that in real time now. And the view that they had a bromance was silly. It was Obama trying to exhibit class in a difficult situation."

Trump himself acknowledged in the CBS interview he has "no relationship" with Obama, and the two men have not spoken since Trump waved off Obama from the east front of the US Capitol on Inauguration Day.

There was an unsuccessful attempt by both men to connect shortly after Trump moved into the White House. Following tradition, Obama had left Trump a note on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, which Trump read and wanted to express his appreciation for, according to both a current White House official and a former Obama aide.

Through an aide, Trump tried to reach out to Obama. But his predecessor was traveling west to California, and couldn't take the call. When one of Obama's aides reached back out to the White House to return the call, the new president's staffers said Trump just wanted to say thank you for the note -- and wanted Obama to get the message. The men never connected directly.

Later, after Trump levied his wiretapping charge, top aides to the two men spoke over the phone. But a conversation between the two presidents themselves never materialized.

Since then, there have been no attempts to cool the tensions, according to both men's aides. Instead, the strain has only worsened -- a worrying sign, according to historians.

"If there is no relationship between a president and an ex-president, that means the country is denied the benefit of the experience and wisdom of somebody who has held the most difficult job in this country," Naftali said. "It robs not only the legacy of that former president, but it denies the country of that person's skill set. So I don't think anybody wins."

Unlike most presidents and their predecessors, Trump and Obama found themselves mired in acrimony years before they were brought together as members of the most exclusive club in politics.

Trump spent months in 2010 stoking the false birther theory, which suggested Obama was born outside the United States and was therefore ineligible to serve as president.

Even as late as last year, Trump left unanswered whether he believed Obama was telling the truth about his birthplace. Trump eventually did convene a statement to address the issue, but when reporters arrived to cover it, they discovered the event was mainly meant to promote the opening of Trump's new hotel.

In 2010, when Trump was stoking the birther movement, few in the White House would have imagined that Trump would one day be positioned to unravel major elements of Obama's presidential agenda. Indeed, Obama himself ruthlessly mocked Trump during a speech at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner.

This week, Trump escalated his attacks on Obama over the Russia hacking, claiming Obama had done little to combat Moscow's cybermeddling in last year's presidential contest.

"The reason that President Obama did NOTHING about Russia after being notified by the CIA of meddling is that he expected Clinton would win and did not want to 'rock the boat,' " Trump tweeted. "He didn't 'choke,' he colluded or obstructed, and it did the Dems and Crooked Hillary no good."

Obama appeared less than disturbed by the barbs when he was photographed, along with his family, on vacation in Bali this week. His Oliver Peoples sunglasses in place and a grin pasted on his face, the former leader strolled through the Tirta Empul temple at Tampaksiring Village, his secret service detail corralling a crowd straining to take his photo.

Earlier in the week he was seen careening down the Ayung River in a red raft, a yellow helmet in place, and the ever-worsening rhetoric aimed his direction by Trump half the world away.

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Trump-Obama relationship reaches historic nastiness ...