The stress test results are out, and remarkably similar to the leaked versions that have peppered business media all week: Federal regulators say America's 19 biggest banks needs to raise $75 billion by November. Though somewhat cheerier than estimates from only two months ago, the "too big to fail" banks still have a lot of work to do, said Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner at a news briefing Thursday afternoon. Among the stressed-out banks is Citigroup, which needs to raise $5.5 billion in new capital on top of the $45 billion in rescue funds they must convert into ordinary stock (which will makes the U.S. a 36-percent owner of the bank). Bank of America needs $35 billion but is expected to resist converting government shares; the New York Times reports the bank is more likely to sell assets, including its stake in China Construction Bank. GMAC, General Motors' finance arm needs $11.5 billion more capital. Among the lucky banks that aren't being instructed to raise more capital: JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, MetLife, Bank of New York Mellon, and Capital Onel. But will the stress tests put to rest the nation's economic anxieties? Bloomberg reports that stocks slid today, and bank experts remain divided.

Some mixed messages from Washington: The president, meeting Wednesday with the presidents of Pakistan and Afghanistan to form a counter-Taliban military strategy, promised to avoid civilian casualties in Afghanistan. Obama didn’t specifically mention the U.S. air strikes in the region that have been widely criticized for killing dozens of civilians, saying only that Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the U.S. will “make every effort to avoid civilian casualties.” Earlier, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke of her deep regret for the reported loss of civilian life due to U.S. air strikes. But the Defense Department is claiming the Taliban has framed the U.S.—and that the extremists killed the civilians, not the Americans. “What’s to say they would not take the next step of killing them and making it look like the Americans did it?” a Defense Department official asked.

Talk about adding insult to injury: John Edwards’ campaign spending is under the microscope, and now his DNA might be, as well. His former mistress, Rielle Hunter, has taken Edwards up on his offer to submit to a paternity test to prove he is not the father of her child. The demand comes in the wake of Elizabeth Edwards’ interview with Oprah promoting her new book, in which she spoke of Hunter—not by name, of course—in less than glowing terms. Initially, Hunter had refused the DNA test, saying it would only be an invasion into her privacy. Now the Enquirer reports that a lawyer is in the process of preparing legal action that would force Edwards into the paternity test.

Add Maine to the list of states that have legalized gay marriage. After passing both state legislative bodies, Governor John Baldacci signed the same-sex marriage bill into law on Wednesday. Maine will be the fifth state to allow gay marriage and the second after Vermont to do so legislatively.

The age of the cell phone: Americans are dumping their landlines at the fastest rate ever, making it a challenge for pollsters to find people and ask them what they think about President Obama. About one in five homes didn’t have a landline in the last half of last year, a figure that grew by 2.7 percent over a six-month period. By midterm elections in 2010, about 30 percent of homes will have no landline. Adults living in poverty were the most likely to go wireless last year, though gains were seen among adults between 30 and 60 years old and among those living in rural areas, contradicting the belief that all cell phone-only users are young and urban.

Big day for Al Franken: The Minnesota Senate victor—but not yet senator, pending Norm Coleman’s endless appeals—met with Vice President Biden at the White House Wednesday. Later, Biden said Franken needs to be instated so that Minnesota can have two senators. The Minnesota Supreme Court has scheduled Coleman’s appeal for the first week of June, with a decision expected a few weeks later. The Republican has not ruled out appealing to federal courts if the state court upholds Franken as the winner of November’s race, but it’s expected that Gov. Tim Pawlenty will sign Franken into office before then. “Once the Minnesota Supreme Court has issued its final ruling in this case, the president and I look forward to working with Mr. Franken on building an economy for the 21st century,” the vice president said. Franken is vital to creating a 60-seat filibuster-proof Democratic majority in the Senate.

The “Hobbit” skeletons, found in Indonesia, probably belonged to their own species, according to two new papers in Nature. Researchers have argued heatedly over the origins of the 3-foot-tall, 65-pound people, who roamed the island of Flores 8,000 years ago. The Hobbits most likely descended from an earlier species of human and then were naturally selected to be smaller and smaller in a process called island dwarfing, one team concludes. The Hobbits’ brains were about a third the size of the modern human brain, though the people used stone tools and had “incredibly human” feet—not, apparently, the oversize, floppy appendages imagined by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Looks like someone’s feeling a little sensitive: Rush Limbaugh launched an angry attack on fellow Republican Colin Powell Wednesday on his radio show, firing back at the former secretary of state for saying Limbaugh diminishes the party with his “nastiness.” Limbaugh said Powell should join the Democratic Party instead of pretending he wants to reform the GOP. “He’s just mad at me because I’m the one person in the country who had the guts to explain his endorsement of Obama,” Limbaugh said. “It was purely and solely based on race.” At a speech on Monday, Powell said the Republican Party is in “deep trouble” because of polarizing figures like Limbaugh, who “diminishes the party and intrudes or inserts into our public life a kind of nastiness that we would be better to do without.”

The Obama administration is about to bring NASA’s ambitions back to earth: The White House Thursday will announce a review of NASA’s proposal to send its astronauts to the moon in the coming years in order to offset losses from the closing of its space shuttle program. NASA’s shuttle fleet retires next year, and there’s a five-year gap between the last scheduled flight and the first launch of the Ares I rocket, which has astronauts and other workers worried they’ll be without work in the interim. Sources say the budget’s five-year plan will reduce funding in 2013 for NASA’s moon projects, including the Ares rocket.

Was he method acting? When Kiefer Sutherland allegedly head-butted Proenza Schouler designer Jack McCollough at an afterparty for the Met Costume Gala in Manhattan early Tuesday morning, he might have violated his parole for a DUI. The 24 star served more than a month in jail after pleading guilty to driving under the influence in 2007 in Los Angeles, his second offense. He was sentenced to 60 months’ probation, which means he could go back to jail to serve 10 more months if he violated parole. Police are investigating a claim that Sutherland broke McCollough’s nose after the designer slighted actress Brooke Shields (Shields’ rep denies this report). “Kiefer is sorry it happened,” Sutherland’s friend told E! News. “Absolutely. It’s terribly regrettable.”

A German woman has been denied in her quest to change her name to one so long that she would probably run out of breath just introducing herself. The desired name? Frieda Rosemarie Thalheim-Kunz-Hallstein, a combination of her and her husband’s surnames. A panel of judges denied the request on the grounds that the name “lessened the impact of...what it was supposed to do, namely ‘to identify.’” The case highlights one of Germany’s quirks: Parents naming their kids have to choose the name from a government-approved list, and any departure from the list must be approved. In the case of Thalheim-Kunz-Hallstein, there was one hyphen too many.

The change in tone in Washington orchestrated by President Obama is yielding concrete results: A British diplomat says China is ready to take a seat at the negotiating table over emission limits that would reduce global warming. The rapidly developing nation had flatly refused to agree to any international accord previously, as it claimed it was being unfairly targeted by chronic polluters in the developed world. The U.S. and China combined count for 40 percent of the world’s annual carbon emissions, The Guardian reports. Now that Obama has signaled that the U.S. will be self-regulating to a large degree and made it clear that he is open to dialogue, China has changed its tone, as well.

Scary news from central Connecticut: A student at Wesleyan University has been killed at a popular bookstore near campus. The unnamed student, a woman, was pronounced dead at Middletown Hospital after being shot several times Wednesday afternoon; she was not identified pending notification of her family. The Middletown Press reports the gunman is the victim’s ex-boyfriend; a wig has been recovered from the crime scene at the Red and Black Café, inside Broad Street Books. “It was focused. This wasn’t random from what I can tell,” the town’s mayor says of the shooting. “Somebody went into a bookstore and fired multiple shots at one person.” A gun was recovered at the scene; the gunman, however, remains at large.

Michael Steele may want to start the bus: According to The Washington Times, “Capitulating to critics on the Republican National Committee, embattled Republican Party Chairman Michael S. Steele has signed a secret pact agreeing to controls and restraints on how he spends hundreds of millions of dollars in party funds and contracts.” The agreement will bring back a 33-year RNC veteran who Steele fired last month as an on-call adviser to the RNC treasurer. According to the Times, “It represents the first time in memory that rebel members of the Republican Party's national governing body have successfully taken on the party's historically powerful national chairman and his loyalists.”

Wednesday’s all-important meeting with the presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan was supposed to focus on coordinating efforts against the Taliban. Instead, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had to open with an apology to Afghanistan for an U.S. air strike that is believed to have killed dozens of innocents. Clinton said she, along with the administration, “deeply regretted” the mistake, and pledged a joint investigation that would get to the bottom of the fatal error. Both Afghanistan and Pakistan agreed to cooperate with each other against the rising Taliban, whose members are moving between the two countries with ease. President Hamid Karzai and President Asif Ali Zardari also agreed on an accord that would expand economic ties between their two countries.

Hm … Which one has the evidence on their side? On Good Morning America today, Bristol Palin said “I just want to go out there and promote abstinence and say, this is the safest choice”; on The Early Show, Levi Johnston said “Abstinence is a great idea, but I also think you need to enforce, you know, condoms and birth control and other things like that to have safe sex. I don't just think telling young kids, you can't have sex, it's not going to work. It's not realistic.” Bristol said that, if she could do it over, “I would have waited, waited to have sex,” but Levi doesn’t seem hurt by her regret: “It's a great idea and a great message she's trying to send out to the world and all the young kids. It's not easy raising a baby. But I do think there's more things to it than just not having sex.”

You can't enjoy these in prison: Madoff “had a roving eye and . . . a habit of getting frequent massages,” Madoff’s secretary, Eleanor Squillari, says in an interview in the upcoming Vanity Fair. “One day, I caught him scouting the escort pages that run alongside pictures of scantily clad women in the back of a magazine," she said. “He straightened up in his chair, startled, and said, 'I'm just looking!'” He had, apparently, about a dozen numbers for “masseuses” in his address book and would schedule hour-long “massages” in the middle of the day. Madoff would also “try to pat me on the ass,” Squillari says, and say, “You know it excites you” when he would exit his office bathroom while still zipping his fly.

Ben Southall, a bungee-jumping, scuba-diving fundraiser from the U.K., is getting paid more than $100,000 to sit in the sun, snorkel, and blog about life in paradise. He beat more than 34,000 applicants from across the world for what has been branded “the best job in the world”—caretaker of Hamilton Island, in Queensland, Australia. Southall will move into a three-bedroom beach villa overlooking the waters of the Great Barrier Reef and start “work” in July. He describes himself as "the adventurous, crazy, energetic one" and "practically a fish." He seems to have won over the judges with his combination of enthusiasm for nature and the outdoors and savvy media skills. Southall was picked from a short list of 16 candidates, hailing from 15 countries, who competed to impress a selection panel in a process that was part job interview and part reality television show. Unfortunately for Southall, however, the gig only lasts six months.

First divorce, now excommunication? Cardinal Walter Kasper, the head of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, has reprimanded Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi for his lack of "seriousness and sobriety." The Catholic daily Avvenire editorialized about Berlusconi’s "self-declared weakness for actresses in the bloom of youth,” said Italy deserved a PM who was the "mirror of the country's soul," and called on Berlusconi to be more "sober and somber." Defending himself on television against charges he slept with a minor, Berlusconi said "Would the Prime Minister be so crazy to get into a situation like that?" Everything we know so far about Berlusconi indicates that yes, yes he would.

A trickle has turned into a flood: Brokers are bolting from Wall Street in record numbers as slumping markets have investors turning away from stocks that produce high commissions. At the current rate, about 35,000 brokers will leave the industry by the end of the year, leaving about 630,000 behind. Brokers are often paid a percentage of the clients’ assets they manage—which tumbled with the markets last year. Investors have also turned to money market or insured deposit accounts for safety, neither of which pay much in commission. The cadre of brokers who make more than $1 million in fees are still in hot demand at firms like UBS and Bank of America, The Wall Street Journal reports.

A torture scoop: The New York Times is reporting that the Justice Department's inquiry into the conduct of the Bush administration lawyers who okayed harsh interrogation tactics has concluded that they committed serious lapses of judgment, but should not be prosecuted. The report, by the Office of Professional Responsibility, is likely to ask that Jay Bybee and John Yoo be disciplined but not criminally prosecuted. Could the news be due to Bush lobbying? The Washington Post reports that former Bush administration officials are lobbying behind the scenes to persuade Justice Department leaders to “soften” an ethics report criticizing the lawyers. Attorneys for the two Bybee and Yoo have encouraged such lobbying from the ex-Bush officials, sources tell the paper. The two men faced a deadline of yesterday to respond to investigators, but have not yet done so. 

Five years ago, Connie Culp’s husband shot her point-blank before turning the gun on himself, leaving his wife with a hole in her face that doctors attempted to fix—to no avail, even after 30 operations. In December, Culp received the first full face transplant in the U.S. Doctors graphed a face donated from a dead woman onto Culp’s, and now she can eat, speak, and breathe on her own. Until Tuesday, when Culp debuted her new face, her identity was kept secret. “I guess I’m the one you came to see today,” she said at a news conference. But she added: “I think it’s more important that you focus on the donor family that made it, so I could have this person’s face.”

Despite the fizzling swine flu threat, the Obama administration is weighing a fall vaccine campaign that would ask Americans to get two new swine flu vaccines in addition to the seasonal flu shot. The multibillion-dollar effort would challenge vaccine manufacturers as well as the ability of the government to track side effects to the new vaccines. During the 1976 swine flu scare, hundreds of Americans were left with neurological disorders after receiving the voluntary vaccine. “There will be adverse effects to any vaccine. That’s just science,” says Michael Hattwick, who was in charge of tracking vaccine side effects during the ’76 swine flu outbreak. The vaccine would first be tested on animals and then on humans in clinical trials before being rolled out.

You would think that if you were to star on a reality show, one of the first things you would realize is that you can’t cheat on your wife but apparently Jon Gosselin didn’t get the memo: Us Weekly reports that the father from Jon & Kate Plus 8, which is about him, his wife, and their eight children (one set of sextuplets, another of twins), has been caught having an affair. He met his 23-year-old mistress, a third grade teacher, at the Chill Lounge in Reading, Pennsylvania. The mistress’s brother tells Us, “A lot of the time, it was pretty, um, gross listening to her, you know, um—how do I say this? The walls are thin. Let’s just say that. I mean, no one wants to hear his sister having sex, let alone with a married dude who's, like, almost twice her age and who has eight kids and a maybe-crazy wife. Ick. Nast.”

Arlen Specter was hoping to keep the seniority he accrued in several key committees during his years as a Republican. Instead, Senate Democrats have placed him in junior slots on each of the five committees on which he serves. Democrats have suggested that they will consider revisiting Specter's seniority claim after the midterm elections next year, but the move may actually hurt his bid for reelection. Without committee seniority, he cannot claim that that he is in key positions to benefit his constituents. He will lose out, for example, on an appropriations subcommittee chairmanship, a critical foothold he has used in the past to disperse billions of dollars to Pennsylvania. The fall may also take a toll on his pride. After having chaired the committee and ran the confirmations of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., Specter will now be the last senator to ask questions of an eventual Supreme Court nominee.

Bostonians have something other to celebrate than the victory over the Yankees last night: “The Boston Globe's largest union reached a tentative deal with the New York Times Co. shortly after 3 a.m. this morning, agreeing to a substantial pay cut, unpaid furloughs, and modifications to the lifetime job guarantee provisions that protect almost 200 employees in the Boston Newspaper Guild.” The New York Times Co. now has the $20 million in concessions it demanded a month ago, which means that the Globe will continue printing.

Initial reports that Bank of Amerca might need $10 billion in new capital appear to have been low-balled: The bank needs a whopping $33.9 billion according to The New York Times. “If the bank is unable to raise the capital cushion by selling assets or stock, it would have to rely on the government, which has provided $45 billion in capital through the Troubled Asset Relief Program.” What about those banks that are doing better and want to return the funds? “Banks that want to return Troubled Asset Relief Program funds will have to demonstrate their ability to wean themselves off another major federal program, according to senior government officials, making it less attractive for some banks to return the money,” reports The Wall Street Journal. The other program is the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which allows banks to borrow inexpensively and has lent $332.5 billion since last fall. The repayment conditions could be released as early as today.

Time to take on the Taliban: President Obama begins talks with leaders of Pakistan and Afghanistan on Wednesday to redraft the already outdated security strategy they released just five weeks ago. As the Taliban insurgency moves closer to Pakistan’s political center, the three countries must work quickly to prevent the militants from fracturing Pakistan and gaining control of Islamabad’s nuclear weapons. Afghanistan is not as much of a problem: “By comparison, it looks like Canada,” one U.S. official tells the Los Angeles Times. The Defense Department is pushing for $400 million in military aid, and the Obama administration wants to disburse more than a billion and a half more over five years under certain conditions from Pakistan. Obama will have to use all his powers of diplomacy at the talks: Pakistan is intensely opposed to U.S. “drone” airstrikes and Afghanistan is frustrated over civilian casualties.

Even when off the set of 24, Kiefer Sutherland is one intense individual who won’t hesitate to leap to the rescue—even when the rescue is unwanted, apparently. At a late night star-studded party after the Costume Institute gala Monday evening, a reportedly intoxicated Sutherland was chatting up old co-star Brooke Shields at the bar when Proenza Schouler designer Jack McCollough bumped into her. Sutherland took exception to this—and in true Bauer fashion sought an apology by any means necessary. The confrontation, fueled by booze and testosterone, escalated, and Sutherland “‘pulled this stupid wrestling move like a teenager,’ then slammed McCollough in the face,” the New York Daily News reports. Shields, it seems, is taking McCullough’s side, saying Sutherland overreacted. The NYPD is on the case and will likely speak to Sutherland soon.

Holy cow: Citigroup may need more than $50 billion, according to the Financial Times. Following the news that Bank of America needs a whopping $34 billion, Bloomberg is now reporting that Wells Fargo, the fourth largest bank by assets, will need $15 billion in new capital. JPMorgan Chase, on the other hand, is in the clear: No new capital needed! The stock market, rational as always, closed up about 100 points on the news that many of the largest banks need several billion more dollars. Reuters writes, “A recent stock market rally may allow U.S. banks to issue common shares to meet new capital requirements under stress tests, a possibility that was unthinkable just a few months ago.”