Five years ago the Defense Department and VA made an effort to streamline the process. It hasn’t worked.

The evaluations are a critical step for injured service members who are preparing to leave the military. Washington Senator Patty Murray is Chairman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee. Murray grilled VA and DOD leaders about the wait times during a committee hearing Wednesday.

Murray: “That’s unacceptable for someone just waiting to figure out what they’re going to do with the rest of their lives.”

The GAO’s report found that last year active duty troops waited nearly 400 days for evaluations, longer for National Guard and Reserve.Further Murray says she’s concerned about the evaluation process itself known as IDES which can have the effect of seeming to pit commanders against soldiers.

Polls have closed on a historic day in Egypt: For many it was the first time they had a say in who their leader will be. Hosni Mubarak, who ruled the country for 29 years, was ousted last year. And before him, for another 30 or so years, Egyptian presidents have run unopposed.

Kimberly Adams was at the polls in Cairo today for NPR. She filed this report for our Newscast unit:

"Many waited in line for hours to choose the replacement for President Hosni Mubarak, who was booted from office during the Arab Spring.

Shares of Facebook on Wednesday made up a little of the ground they've lost since the company's troubled stock offering last week. But the company and its lead underwriter, Morgan Stanley, still face a lot of legal problems.

Some of the investors who bought shares of the company filed a lawsuit alleging that the two companies concealed information about Facebook's expected performance.

Officials in Beijing have ruled that public restrooms in the Chinese capital can have no more than two flies in them at one time, the BBC reports.

New rules issued Monday by the Beijing Municipal Commission of City Administration and Environment also regulate ads within the bathrooms and state that no more than two pieces of trash can be left uncollected for more than a half-hour.

The rules apply to bathrooms in tourist spots such as parks, railway stations, supermarkets and malls.

CNN host Piers Morgan has been dragged into the U.K.'s hacking scandal once again.

This time, the host of the BBC's Newsnight told a media ethics inquiry that Morgan had showed him how to hack into a cell phone's voice mail.

SkyTV reports that Jeremy Paxman remembered a lunch from September 2002 for two reasons: First because Morgan seemed to imply that he had heard a conversation between another TV presenter Ulrika Jonsson and England football manager Sven-Goran Eriksson.

Transcript

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

The director of the Secret Service assured a Senate committee, today, that a prostitution scandal involving his agents never compromised security. Mark Sullivan also apologized for behavior he said was reckless. It was Sullivan's first public testimony since news broke last month of Secret Service employees picking up prostitutes before a presidential visit to Colombia. He insisted this was an isolated incident.

But NPR's Tamara Keith reports, some on the committee weren't buying it.

A storm is brewing in Washington that could darken political debate for months to come. It's about the debt, the deficit, taxes and spending — all hot topics lawmakers have been fighting about for years now.

This time, though, there's a deadline, and the consequences of inaction would be immediate. That has many in Washington saying: Here we go again.

In the past week, President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner have begun a new round of sparring over the U.S. debt ceiling.

Declaring that a "national emergency" exists in public education, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney shifted from his usual economic message to outline his education platform during a speech to a Latino business group Wednesday.

Romney pledged to provide federal funding for "every" child from low-income families, or those with special needs, to attend the public, public charter or, in some cases, private school of their parents' choice. The proposals are boilerplate Republican Party planks.