Whether it's a free upgrade on a hotel room or skipping ahead in the check-in line, many businesses give preferential treatment to some customers, hoping to make them more loyal. The practice often works — but a new study suggests that when we get perks we didn't earn, negative feelings can result. And they can make a surprise deal a little less sweet.

That's the gist of a study to be published later this year in the Journal of Consumer Research, with the forthright title "Consumer Reaction to Unearned Preferential Treatment."

"The current research demonstrates that, although receiving unearned preferential treatment does generate positive reactions, it is not always an entirely pleasurable experience," write the study's authors, Lan Jiang, Joandrea Hoegg, and Darren W. Dahl.

The displeasing aspects of a treat tend to peak, they write, when the perks are given in public, in front of other customers who are no different than the recipient of the business's generosity.

"We propose that receiving something that others have just as much right to receive can activate concerns about negative evaluations, reducing the satisfaction with the preferential treatment," write the researchers, who teach marketing at business schools at the University of Oregon and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

The study's authors found that "satisfaction with receiving preferential treatment can be restored if the observer who does not receive such treatment reacts positively to the recipient's good fortune or if the observer is of a higher status than the recipient."

That's right. The test subjects enjoyed "the positive experience of 'beating' a superior'" so much, the authors say, that it brought "increased overall satisfaction."

It also helps if nobody's looking. To test that theory, the researchers conducted experiments to test "feelings of social discomfort" and try to determine where they come from. They found that even in the most seemingly fair context — a random drawing — the winner felt best about it if they were alone.

All of the tests placed participants in situations in which one person received a surprise bonus. In one case, a booth that was dispensing free product samples suddenly gave one subject more than the others. That was welcomed — especially if no one else was around.

"It's like they wanted to get out of there," co-author JoAndrea Hoegg tells The Globe and Mail. "It's the fear of negative evaluation. If you're getting something you don't deserve, you're thrilled – as long as no one is watching you."

All of this isn't meant to imply that businesses should stop giving people free perks, the researchers say. The trick is to be sure all customers know the deal — and why they're not getting it. Other options include using scratch-off game tabs and loyalty emails, which can be kept private, to connect with customers.

Such steps, they say, "would minimize the potential for negative emotions."

Six former employees and one contractor say Bank of America's mortgage servicing unit consistently lied to homeowners, fraudulently denied loan modifications and offered bonuses to staff for intentionally pushing people into foreclosure, according to a Salon.com report.

The allegations were made in sworn statements that added to a civil lawsuit filed in federal court in Massachusetts.

One of the former employees, Erika Brown, said in her statement that the bank's practice was to "string homeowners along with no apparent intention of providing the permanent loan modifications it promises."

Salon explained the process in more detail:

"The government's Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), which gave banks cash incentives to modify loans under certain standards, was supposed to streamline the process and help up to 4 million struggling homeowners (to date, active permanent modifications number about 870,000). In reality, Bank of America used it as a tool, say these former employees, to squeeze as much money as possible out of struggling borrowers before eventually foreclosing on them. Borrowers were supposed to make three trial payments before the loan modification became permanent; in actuality, many borrowers would make payments for a year or more, only to find themselves rejected for a permanent modification, and then owing the difference between the trial modification and their original payment."

The employees' statements went on to describe a system of negligence, falsifying records and mass, systematic rejections of loan modification applications — called a "blitz" — all intended to force borrowers into foreclosure and allow Bank of America to collect additional fees from them.

The statements also described a system of cash bonuses, as well as gift cards for local retailers, offered by senior managers to employees who met quotas for pushing accounts into foreclosure.

Bank of America has said the statements paint a "false picture" of the bank's activities and that they are "rife with inaccuracies."

As protests against the Turkish government enter their third week, activists are taking increasingly creative measures to maintain their momentum.

Over the weekend, police removed their tent city and re-opened Istanbul's Taksim Square to traffic, while maintaining a strong presence in the area. This might have seemed like the end of it for many protesters, until a lone man decided to take a stand, literally, against the government. For more than six hours Monday night, Erdem Gunduz stood motionless in Taksim Square, passively ignoring any prodding or harassment from police and people passing by.

His unusual form of protest has inspired activists in Turkey and around the world to assume the same pose. He's even become his own meme, as "standing man" (duran adam, in Turkish) supporters upload their own protest photos to Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere.

Women in America's armed services will have new options for what units they can join in coming years, the Pentagon says. The military said in January that it will end its combat exclusion that set a minimum size for units in which women could be deployed; the limit kept many women away from front-line combat units. The shift means women could join elite forces such as the Army Rangers and Navy SEALs.

Depending on the job, women could begin training to join combat units in the next one to three years, according to several military officers who spoke at a Pentagon briefing Tuesday afternoon. Integration into special forces units is expected to take the longest.

"The days of Rambo are over," said Maj. Gen. Sacolick, of the U.S. Special Operations Command Force Management Directorate. Noting that special operations groups are looking for people who can learn other languages and be deployed in a variety of situations, he added, "The defining characteristic of our operators is their intellect."

The change is expected to come slowly, with women not expected to begin training to join ground front-line combat units until at least 2014 or later. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has set a deadline of Jan. 1, 2016 for all positions to be open. Neither Hagel nor the top-ranking officers in military's branches attended Tuesday's media briefing.

Branches of the service are developing gender-neutral tests that will be tailored to their units, and they may request a special exception to the policy shift if they find that their female members can't perform the duties of a specific job.

For instance, Marine Lt. Col. Jon M. Aytes spoke of a scenario in which a woman in an armored unit would be expected to be able to reload a 55-pound shell into the gun's breach, with little opportunity for leverage.

When asked later if the military would develop separate standards for men and women, Aytes and the other officers said no. Aytes noted that tanks don't have one rack of shells for men, and another for women.

In the case of special operations, men who are already serving in those units will be given a survey that's designed to gauge how they feel about women joining their ranks. It will also analyze "the social science impacts... of integrating women into small, elite teams that operate in remote, austere environments," according to the Special Operations plan submitted in March.

"At this point, no decisions have been made," Gen. Sacolick said, of how women might be integrated into the Rangers, SEALS, Marine Special Operators, and other units. "Let me make that clear: No decisions have been made."

Saying that he had spoken to colleagues at other services about the matter, Sacolick added, "I can assure you, we are not predisposed to any course of action."

The major challenge, Sacolick says, is not how the female service members might perform on physical tests — he said he had been impressed by the physical abilities of female recruits. Instead, the largest hurdle could be handling the social and cultural changes, he said.

The news comes months after the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines submitted their plans for including women in ground combat positions. As NPR's Larry Abramson reported, the change could "open up more than 200,000 positions in the military" to women.

"I remain confident that we will retain the trust and confidence of the American people by opening positions to women, while ensuring that all members entering these newly opened positions can meet the standards required to maintain our warfighting capability," wrote Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel in May, after the branches of the service had submitted their plans. He told them, "I appreciate your efforts to methodically and deliberately remove gender-restrictive barriers."

If it's him, it's going to be a letdown.

For the better part of 40 years, the disappearance of former Teamsters President James Hoffa has been a source of fascination on par with Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and the aliens in Roswell, N.M.

If the FBI finds and identifies his body, as agents are currently trying to do just outside Detroit, it will end the mystery and ruin the suspense, says Bob Thompson, a pop culture professor at Syracuse University.

"If it turns out it is Jimmy Hoffa, the story loses all its punch," Thompson says. "Closure is the death knell to these kinds of things."

Hoffa disappeared in 1975. In terms of becoming a figure of popular interest, his timing was impeccable — it was not long after the first two Godfather films had been released, bringing mob culture to the forefront of broad American consciousness.

The presumption from the start was that Hoffa had been killed by mobsters who wanted to keep him from regaining control of the union, so he became the real-life embodiment of interest in the mafia and the whole metaphor of "sleeping with the fishes."

The notion that Hoffa's body might turn up just about anywhere — there have been numerous false leads along the way — became an enduring part of American folklore. The belief that he may have been buried in the end zone at Giants Stadium, which gained currency in the late 1980s, provided fodder for countless cartoons and wisecracks.

Saturday Night Live even speculated that Hoffa was inside R2-D2 in the 1977 film Star Wars.

By that time, Hoffa's disappearance had been enshrined as part of the culture. The 1970s and 1980s were a time when compelling stories were routinely turned into movies and TV miniseries. Hoffa kept recurring as a juicy part for years.

Sylvester Stallone played a character based on him in F.I.S.T. in 1978. Five years later, Robert Blake played him in Blood Feud, which depicted Hoffa's conflicts with Robert F. Kennedy, who had hounded him as a Senate staffer.

He was played by none other than Jack Nicholson in 1992's eponymous Hoffa, and as late as 2003 provided a plotline in Bruce Almighty.

All this helped Hoffa sink in deep as fodder for comedians, who used his name as a punchline when talking about anything that had disappeared or seemed impossible to find.

There's always a fascination with missing persons stories, says Thompson, the Syracuse professor. Everyone knows we all must die, but people who go missing entirely tap into primal fears.

That's why some figures, from 1930s aviatrix Amelia Earhart to the three women found living in a house in Cleveland last month, remain so intriguing years after they first went missing.

If Jimmy Hoffa were somehow still alive, he would be 100 years old.

"Hoffa is really still in the Hall of Fame of compelling mysteries," Thompson says.

Administration officials defended the government's surveillance programs before the the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence today.

Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, Sean Joyce, deputy director of the FBI and James Cole, deputy attorney general, raked over some of the same ground we've been hearing about since The Guardian and The Washington Post released information about a secret NSA program that gathers a vast amount of information about American's electronic activities.

What we did get is more detail. For example Alexander said these programs — including PRISM, which nabs Internet content from foreigners — have helped foil more than 50 terrorism plots and Cole gave a lengthy explanation of the legal system surrounding these programs.

Like we've done for these hearings in the past, we've pulled out three exchanges that, while dense and sometimes boring, will help you understand these programs. Here they are:

— Four Foiled Plots: Joyce gave detailed information about four plots that were foiled with the help of these programs — among them a plot to bomb the New York Stock Exchange:

— Yes Or No: The chairman of the committee, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), went through a series of yes or no questions for Alexander. (If you remember, it was this kind of exchange that turned controversial for Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.) But Alexander said, among other things, that the NSA is not "on private companies' servers" and cannot read Americans' emails:

— A Legal Explanation: This is an extremely long piece of audio, but it's important. If you don't have time to listen to the 20 minutes, we'll highlight a few points: Cole believes the government has done a good job at balancing national security with the Constitutional guarantee to privacy; the programs have oversight by all three branches of government; in the phone program, the U.S. doesn't collect content, only meta-data, which isn't protected under the Fourth Amendment; under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the U.S. does collect content, but it only does so for "non-U.S. persons who are located outside the USA." Essentially, what Cole is describing here is the FISC decision that has not been made public:

We've covered some of this reasoning in a previous post.

It's also worth noting that Edward Snowden, who leaked the documents that got this story rolling, disagrees with that assessment. He has said that policy alone is not sufficient to stop analysts from accessing information they are not legally allowed to look at.

The Boston Bruins have taken the lead in the NHL's Stanley Cup championships, beating the Chicago Blackhawks 2-0 Monday night in Boston. Interestingly, last night wasn't a tense, drawn-out reprise of Games 1 and 2 and did not require an overtime.

Boston's goalie, Tuukka Rask, playing peerlessly, had another shutout, letting the Bruins put it away in the second period. Rask is performing so well that the New York Times (paywall) says he "looks as if he could stop shots even if the Blackhawks were firing them from grenade launchers."

There was early drama even before the game started: Bruins defenseman Zdeno Chara and Chicago forward Marian Hossa left the ice with injuries. Chara was upended during the pregame warm up by teammate Milan Lucic, lost his helmet and ended up needing stitches in his head, according to the Boston Herald. He was able to return. Hossa also participated in the pregame skate but was scratched from the Chicago lineup because of an upper body injury, according to NHL.com. No further explanation has been given.

The Blackhawks immediately felt the loss of Hossa — he was tied for the team's lead in most points scored during the postseason, notes USA Today. He was replaced in the lineup last night by Ben Smith, who hasn't appeared in a Chicago game since late April.

Boston first went ahead in the second period with Daniel Paille's goal, which was his second of the series. (He scored the game-winning goal in Game 2's OT.) Things grew worse for the Blackhawks later that period during a critical power play. For 11 crucial seconds, Chicago had two men in the sin bin, giving Boston a 5-on-3 advantage. That's all Bruin Patrice Bergeron needed, scoring the Bruins' second goal of the game.

USA Today helpfully notes that through the three games, Chicago is 0-for-9 on power plays and only a little better than 11 percent for all the postseason. And they weren't very good at faceoffs, either, observes ESPN Chicago: "Losing a whopping 71 percent of the faceoffs to Boston on Monday night is one way to make sure you never start a shift with the puck."

But the full credit belongs to Boston, says Sports Illustrated: "The Bruins have clogged the neutral zone, limited Chicago's stretch-passing game, and so thoroughly muffled the Hawks that goaltender Tuukka Rask's 28-save effort almost seemed like an afterthought."

In the requisite brawl at the end of the game, Boston's Brad Marchand tangled with Chicago's Andrew Shaw, in what SB Nation calls "a fairly even scrap." But the more dramatic clash came between Boston's Chara and Chicago's Bryan Bickell. It started when Chara elbowed Bickell, who unwisely yanked Chara's jersey in return. Chara stands 6'9" without skates, compared with Bickell at 6'4".

The Stanley Cup's Game 4 is Wednesday night in Boston at 8 ET. Catch it on NBC.

U.S. officials say the Taliban has agreed to begin long-stalled negotiations with the Afghan and American governments at the group's new political office in Doha, Qatar.

The talks with the U.S. could begin in days, NPR's Scott Horsley tells our Newscast unit. He says the milestone agreement comes after months of "diplomatic spadework."

Taliban spokesman Muhammad Naim announced the opening of the Doha office during a joint news conference Tuesday with Qatar's foreign minister. Naim emphasized two points: that the Taliban oppose the use of Afghan soil to threaten other countries and that they support an Afghan peace process.

A senior Obama administration official talking to reporters on a conference call said the United States welcomes the move.

"These statements represent an important first step toward reconciliation, a process that after 30 years of armed conflict in Afghanistan will certainly promise to be complex, long and messy but nonetheless this is an important first step," the official said.

Another administration official tried to temper expectations, saying this is the "beginning of a difficult road," adding that most insurgencies end through a negotiated peace, but that there is "no guarantee that this will happen quickly if at all."

The U.S. officials said they hope the negotiations lead to three outcomes: First, the Taliban must break with al-Qaida, second they must stop the violence and third they must "accept Afghanistan's constitution, including protection for women and minorities."

One official said the statement from the Taliban also is a "first step in distancing themselves from international terrorism."

When asked whether the United States was sure that the office in Doha represented all of the Taliban, the administration official said they understand the office is sanctioned by Mullah Omar, the Taliban's spiritual leader.

All of this comes, of course, on the same day that NATO officially handed off all control of Afghanistan to Afghan forces. We wrote about that in an earlier post.

What started as small protests about higher bus fares has swelled into nationwide, massive anti-government demonstrations in Brazil.

Last night, reports O Globo, more than 100,000 protesters filled the streets of Rio de Janeiro, while an additional 65,000 hit the streets of São Paulo. Nothing tells the story quite like this video of the streets of Rio posted by Lucio Amorim on Twitter:

Reporting from São Paulo, NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro tells our Newscast unit that people on the streets are demanding that the government pay attention to them.

"The cost of living here is extremely high, there's a massive rate of inflation, and so people say that they are fed up, that they want their government to do something for them," Lourdes said.

One of the big issues is that Brazil has been gearing up for the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016. Lourdes says people feel as though the government has been focusing on those big, international events while allowing them to languish.

The New York Times says the protests are the largest and "most resonant since the nation's military dictatorship ended in 1985." What's more, the Times reports, the protests share something in common with the mass protests occurring halfway across the world in Turkey. The newspaper writes:

"The demonstrations in Brazil intensified after a harsh police crackdown last week stunned many citizens. In images shared widely on social media, the police here were seen beating unarmed protesters with batons and dispersing crowds by firing rubber bullets and tear gas into their midst.

" 'The violence has come from the government,' said Mariana Toledo, 27, a graduate student at the University of São Paulo who was among the protesters on Monday. 'Such violent acts by the police instill fear, and at the same time the need to keep protesting.' "

As CNN reports, the protests have another thing in common with Turkey: They began over something relatively small — a 9 cent increase in the price of a bus ticket. One thing that is different, reports CNN, is that President Dilma Rousseff is encouraging the protests.

"Peaceful demonstrations are legitimate and part of democracy. It is right for the youth to protest," she said in a statement.

Good morning, here are our early stories:

— In Interview, Obama Defends NSA Data Collection.

— NATO Hands Over Security Duty To Afghan Forces.

And here are more early headlines:

Russia Faces Pressure Over Syria At G-8 Summit. (Reuters)

As Many As 200,000 Brazilians Protest Price Increases, Corruption. (BBC)

Turkey Arrests Dozens In Effort To Stamp Out Anti-Government Protests. (VOA)

Obama Hints He May Search For New Federal Reserve Chief. (Bloomberg)

Still Looking For Jimmy Hoffa In Detroit Suburb. (Detroit Free Press)

Half Of New Astronaut Class Are Women. (USA Today)

Boston Bruins Defeat Chicago Blackhawks, Take NHL Championship Lead. (Boston.com)

Former New York City Mayor Koch's Tombstone Has Wrong Birth Date. (WNBC)

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

• VICE magazine has a reputation for using provocative content to draw an audience — Dennis Rodman's North Korean tour comes to mind — but a spread in the magazine's recent fiction issue has sparked particular fury. Next to short stories by Mary Gaitskill and Joyce Carol Oates is a fashion spread featuring models posing as female writers such as Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf on the brink of committing suicide. One photo in the shoot titled "Last Words" shows a model impersonating the poet Elise Cowen, who died after jumping out of a window, lying prostrate on the sidewalk. The writer Michele Filgate responded to the spread in an essay for Salon: "Art can and at times should be provocative — there's no doubt about that. Yet this isn't art. This is an editorial decision to get more pageviews." And the comedian and author Caitlin Moran tweeted, "In the interest of balancing Vice's "female writers commit suicide" fashion shoot, I'd like to report I'm eating breakfast & am immortal."
• The mysterious Edinburgh book sculptor, who leaves anonymous, delicate artworks made from books all over the city, has struck again. A sculpture of a bird's nest, complete with hungry baby birds, materialized in the city's Leith Library. It bears a quote from Winnie-the-Pooh author A.A. Milne: "It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn't use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like 'What about lunch?"
• Jonathan Franzen, the austerely spectacled novelist and avian enthusiast, contacted The New York Times in response to a Frank Bruni column on sexism. He writes: "There may still be gender imbalances in the world of books, but very strong numbers of women are writing, editing, publishing and reviewing novels. The world most glaringly dominated by male sexism is one that Mr. Bruni neglects to mention: New York City theater." Franzen has been in the center of a spirited debate on gender bias ever since he called Edith Wharton ugly in a New Yorker essay and referred to Times critic Michiko Kakutani as "the stupidest person in New York" during a panel on literary criticism.
• The poet Ange Mlinko speaks to The Paris Review about the writing process: "I grew up listening to languages my immigrant parents didn't want to teach me, so I get a regressive pleasure out of feeling my way through sounds to their possible meanings. Not "getting" a word, or a line, or a poem at first read was never an obstacle for me — in fact, it was a seduction."
• The Vault, Slate's history blog, features the childhood drawings of the poet E.E. Cummings. One shows a soldier and a rhinoceros telling each other stories. Another is a poster for the "Estlin Cummings Wild West Show." (It brings to mind Cummings' Buffalo Bill, "who used to ride a watersmooth-silver stallion and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat.")
• It seems that Apple has at least one advantage over the Department of Justice in the ebook price-fixing case: basic computer skills. The New York Times reports (with admirable restraint): "Apple's legal team used a MacBook to shuffle between evidence documents, stacking them side by side in split screens and zooming in on specific paragraphs. By contrast, the Justice Department's lawyers could show only one piece of evidence at a time. One video that Mr. Buterman played as evidence failed to produce the audio commentary needed to make his point."

At a ceremony in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Tuesday, NATO officially handed over security of Afghanistan to the country's forces. It marked the first time the whole nation has been under Afghan control since the coalition invaded to oust the Taliban in 2001.

From Brussels, Teri Schultz filed this report for our Newscast unit:

"Afghan forces are now leading security operations all over the country, as NATO-led forces gradually drop back into a supporting role in the remaining, most difficult, districts.

"In Kabul, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen congratulated Afghan President Hamid Karzai on reaching what's called 'Milestone 2013.'

" 'Your forces are showing great courage. Great skill. And making great sacrifices,' Rasmussen said.

"Karzai said his citizens should be proud, too.

"'The Afghan people will see their own children providing protection to their lives and country,' Karzai said.

"Though many Afghans do want foreign troops out as scheduled at the end of 2014, others fear their forces may be left without enough equipment and training to do the job alone."

As the BBC reports, the challenges ahead were evident just before the handover ceremony, when a suicide bomber elsewhere in Kabul killed "three employees of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and wounded more than 20."

But as the BBC also points out, in the broader history of Afghanistan, this is a momentous day: "For the first time since the departure of Soviet forces in 1989 and the years of civil war that followed, security across the whole of Afghanistan is now the responsibility of forces led by the Afghan government."

Another bit of important news to come out of Afghanistan today is that Karzai confirmed his government will hold peace talks with the Taliban.

According to Al-Jazeera, the Taliban had said earlier that it was getting ready to open a political office in Doha, Qatar.

"Until earlier this year, Karzai was strongly opposed to the Taliban having a meeting venue outside Afghanistan, but the U.S. has pushed for the Taliban to be present at the negotiating table," Al-Jazeera reports.

In a 45-minute interview with PBS' Charlie Rose, President Obama defended a government program that collects vast data about the electronic activity of Americans.

Obama rejected comparisons to the Bush-Cheney administration, saying his administration had implemented new safeguards to protect Americans' privacy.

"Some people say, 'Well, you know, Obama was this raving liberal before. Now he's, you know, Dick Cheney.' Dick Cheney sometimes says, 'Yeah, you know? He took it all lock, stock and barrel.' My concern has always been not that we shouldn't do intelligence gathering to prevent terrorism, but rather are we setting up a system of checks and balances," Obama said.

He also made a distinction that others in his administration have been making: The government is looking at metadata — duration, time and date, for example — not the content of phone calls. He said some people will say that with that metadata you could glean names and other information.

"All of that is true, except for the fact that for the government, under the program right now, to do that it would be illegal. We would not be allowed to do that," Obama said.

The president defended the transparency of the program, but he also said he has asked the intelligence community to meet and decide whether more details of the program can become public.

"What I've asked the intelligence community to do is see how much of this we can declassify without further compromising the program," Obama said. "And they are in that process of doing so now."

Update at 6:33 a.m. Obama Hints At Bernanke Exit:

President Obama also hinted at an exit for Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who he said had stayed in his post "longer than he wanted or he was supposed to."

Bloomberg has more.

One day after pictures emerged of TV personality Nigella Lawson seemingly being choked by her husband, British police have cautioned former advertising executive Charles Saatchi over the incident. Police reportedly questioned Saatchi for five hours Monday. Lawson is a cookbook author who has also been a frequent guest on NPR's Morning Edition.

Earlier Monday, Saatchi, 70, had said that photos showing his hands around his wife's throat during what appears to be an argument on a restaurant's patio had been misinterpreted. The photographs were published in the newspaper Sunday People, an arm of The Daily Mirror.

The images created an uproar in Britain, where several newspapers descended on the story and republished the photographs in online galleries. On Facebook, Lawson's fans posted messages of support to her main profile page, as well as using the comment field of a story on griddles to give Lawson, 53, advice.

Lawson and Saatchi married in 2003. There has been no public statement about the incident from Lawson, but a family spokesman confirmed that "the chef and her children had moved out of their home," CNN reports. Saatchi said Monday that she left to get away from the media around their house.

"Saatchi said the pictures showed a 'playful tiff,'" The Guardian reports. "He told the London Evening Standard – for which he is a columnist – that the pictures gave a 'more drastic and violent impression' of the incident than had been the case."

"About a week ago, we were sitting outside a restaurant having an intense debate about the children, and I held Nigella's neck repeatedly while attempting to emphasize my point," The Standard quotes Saatchi saying today.

A photographer captured the scene from outside the seating area. It was the publication of those photos Sunday that led to Monday's probe by police.

The Mirror quotes a Metropolitan Police spokesman as saying, "This afternoon a 70-year-old man voluntarily attended a Central London police station and accepted a caution for assault."

The altercation also drew the attention of other patrons.

"Onlookers were said to be shocked, saying Ms Lawson appeared to be trying to pacify her husband, placing a hand on his left wrist and at one point kissing him on the cheek," The Standard reports. The newspaper relays this account from a witness: "It was utterly shocking to watch. I have no doubt she was scared. She was very tearful and constantly dabbing her eyes. Nigella was very, very upset."

"Under British law, a caution is a formal warning given to someone who admits a minor offense, the AP reports. "It carries no penalty, but it can be used as evidence of bad character if a person is later prosecuted for a different crime."

Three U.S. Naval Academy football players will face charges in the alleged rape of a female midshipman in 2012, according to reports. Officials at the school, which is governed by military law, say they will send the case to Article 32 proceedings, which could then lead to a court-martial. A date has not been set for the hearings.

The case dates from April of 2012, when the female midshipman reported that she had been sexually assaulted by three men after she went to a party in Annapolis.

"The woman woke up after a night of heavy drinking and later learned from friends and social media that three football players claimed to have had sex with her while she was intoxicated," reports The Capital Gazette, citing a statement from, Susan Burke, the woman's attorney.

"Burke said her client reported the allegations to Navy criminal investigators," the newspaper reports. "The athletes were permitted to continue playing football pending the outcome of the investigation."

The Gazette and other media outlets report that the case was put on hold for a period of time, before being taken up again. The men have not been publicly identified, but the newspaper says that officials placed a hold on one of the men's graduation in light of the investigation.

In recent weeks, the female midshipman's mother spoke to The Washington Post about her daughter's case and accused the Naval Academy of letting her daughter down.

"It's like, to the academy, it never happened, and it was all brushed away," she said.

In late May, the woman's attorney said the midshipman had been "ostracized" on the academy's campus. She also noted that the Navy reopened the investigation after the woman got legal help.

Days before the woman and her attorney took their case to the media in late May, President Obama gave the commencement address at the Naval Academy, using the occasion to speak out against sexual assaults.

The problem of sexual abuse has bedeviled military branches in the United States and elsewhere.

Frustration with charges of sexual assaults and sexist emails sent between officers led Australia's army chief to deliver a fiery and forceful speech against such actions last week.