• Spacecraft docks at International Space Station

MOSCOW - A Russian spacecraft carrying a three-man crew docked successfully at the International Space Station on Thursday following a flawless launch.

The Soyuz craft, carrying NASA's Reid Wiseman, Russian cosmonaut Max Surayev and Germany's Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency arrived at the station at 5:44 a.m. They lifted off just less than six hours earlier from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The Mission Control in Moscow congratulated the trio on a successful docking.

They are joining two Russians and an American who have been at the station since March.

The Russian and U.S. space agencies have continued to cooperate despite friction between the two countries over Ukraine. NASA depends on the Russian spacecraft to ferry crews to the space station and pays Russia nearly $71 million per seat.

• Obama balances intervention and isolation

WEST POINT, N.Y. - Seeking to redefine America's foreign policy for a post-war era, President Barack Obama on Wednesday declared that the United States remains the only nation with the capacity to lead on the world stage but argued it would be a mistake to channel that power into unrestrained military adventures.

Obama's approach, outlined in a commencement address at the U.S. Military Academy, underscored his efforts to straddle the line between global isolation and intervention. Neither view, he said, "fully speaks to the demands of this moment."

"It is absolutely true that in the 21st century, American isolation is not an option," Obama said in remarks to more than 1,000 of the military's newest officers. "But to say that we have an interest in pursuing peace and freedom beyond our borders is not to say that every problem has a military solution."

Obama has often struggled to articulate not only what should fill the space between intervention and isolation but also any success the administration has had in finding that middle ground. His preferred tool kit, which includes economic sanctions, diplomatic negotiations and international coalition building, rarely generates quick fixes and is often more ambiguous than more easily explained military action.

The president's strategy also has garnered mixed results. While diplomacy and sanctions have brought the U.S. and Iran closer to a nuclear accord than ever before, neither approach has stopped the bloodshed of Syria's four-year civil war or prevented Russia from annexing territory from Ukraine.

• Phoenix VA clinic had 1,700 vets awaiting care

WASHINGTON - About 1,700 veterans in need of care were "at risk of being lost or forgotten" after being kept off the official waiting list at the troubled Phoenix veterans hospital, the Veterans Affairs watchdog said Wednesday in a scathing report that increases pressure on Secretary Eric Shinseki to resign.

The investigation, initially focused on the Phoenix hospital, found systemic problems in the VA's sprawling nationwide system, which provides medical care to about 6.5 million veterans each year. The interim report confirmed allegations of excessive waiting time for care in Phoenix, with an average 115-day wait for a first appointment for those on the waiting list - 91 days longer than the 24-day average the hospital had reported.

"While our work is not complete, we have substantiated that significant delays in access to care negatively impacted the quality of care at this medical facility," Richard J. Griffin, the department's acting inspector general, wrote in the 35-page report. It found that "inappropriate scheduling practices are systemic throughout" the VA's 1,700 health facilities nationwide, including 150 hospitals and 820 clinics.

Griffin said 42 centers are under investigation, up from 26.

Four Senate Democrats facing tough election campaigns - Colorado's Mark Udall, Montana's John Walsh, Kay Hagan of North Carolina and Al Franken of Minnesota - called for Shinseki to leave. "We need new leadership who will demand accountability to fix these problems," Udall said in a statement.

• Were pings heard in April from missing jet?

CANBERRA, Australia - A U.S. Navy spokesman on Thursday dismissed as "speculative and premature" an American expert's reported comments that the acoustic "pings" at the center of the search for the missing Malaysian plane had not come from the jet's black boxes.

CNN reported the Navy's civilian deputy director of ocean engineering, Michael Dean, had said most countries now agreed that the sounds detected by the Navy's Towed Ping Locator in April in the southern Indian Ocean came from a man-made source unrelated to the jet, which vanished March 8 with 239 people on board.

"Mike Dean's comments today were speculative and premature, as we continue to work with our partners to more thoroughly understand the data acquired by the Towed Pinger Locator," U.S. Navy spokesman Chris Johnson said in a statement, referring to Australia and Malaysia.

- The Associated Press