A federal judge in Nevada who handed horse protection advocates a rare victory last fall has rejected their latest request to block government roundups of free-roaming mustangs in the West, saying they'll have to go to Congress if they think the animals are being treated inhumanely and need more protection.

U.S. District Judge Howard McKibben granted a temporary restraining order on Aug. 30 that cut short by a day a roundup near the Nevada-Utah line after he determined a helicopter flew too close to a horse in violation of the law.

But he said during a hearing in Reno Thursday that he was denying a new injunction request from the Texas-based Free Wild Horse Federation partly because the Bureau of Land Management has made some positive changes since then. He also said he can't issue injunctions based on speculation about future abuses.

"This court is really not in a position to be the overseer of the BLM," McKibben said. "This court is not going to police all gathers in the U.S. or even all gathers in the district of northern Nevada."

"This Court is not Congress, not an administrative agency. We are not the first branch of government. We are not the second branch. We're here to consider grievances," he said.

His ruling was a disappointment to horse protection advocates who were buoyed by his court order last fall when he took the BLM to task for its actions at the Triple B complex roundup near the Nevada-Utah line northwest of Ely, Nev.

An Ohio investment group's lawsuit seeking to collect $100 million on three-decade-old Venezuelan promissory notes is headed back to a federal judge for further deliberations.

The decision by the U.S. Supreme Court not to hear the case was a setback for Venezuela, which argued that federal law protects it from U.S. lawsuits because it is a foreign state.

The high court declined on Monday to accept Venezuela's appeal of a 2010 federal appeals court decision that said the suit filed by Skye Ventures of Columbus could go forward in the U.S.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also said a lower court must determine whether the case should be tried in Venezuela, which will be the next step.

Skye seeks payment on the notes from a defunct government-sponsored bank.

A judge overstepped his authority when he tried to ban enforcement around the world of an $18 billion judgment against Chevron Inc. for environmental damage in Ecuador, a federal appeals court said Thursday as it explained why it lifted the ban last year.

The three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the judge has authority to block collection if Ecuadorean plaintiffs move against Chevron in New York, but law does not give him authority "to dictate to the entire world which judgments are entitled to respect and which countries' courts are to be treated as international pariahs."

The judgment came last February after nearly two decades of litigation that stemmed from the poisoning of land in the Ecuadorean rainforest while the oil company Texaco was operating an oil consortium from 1972 to 1990 in the Amazon. Texaco became a wholly owned subsidiary of Chevron in 2001.

Chevron obtained an order from U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan last March blocking Ecuadorean plaintiffs from trying to collect the $18 billion until he could stage a trial to determine if the judgment was obtained fairly.