While war is simmering in the Persian Gulf, says The Economist, not so far away, in the countries along the Red Sea, “the fighting is really raging”. Yemen’s 12-year-old civil war is “spilling beyond its borders”, with rocket attacks on ships in the Red Sea and strikes on Saudi infrastructure. The civil war in Sudan, which has already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and displaced 11 million people, rages on, and yet another civil war in Ethiopia threatens to become a regional one as forces from Eritrea join the fighting. In short, the area has become a “vast zone of devastation”.

One of the key forces fuelling these gruesome conflicts is the “petty rivalry” between Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman and UAE leader Mohamed bin Zayed. Fiercely competitive over their positions in the Gulf, the pair rarely fall on the same side when it comes to foreign policy. For the past three years in Sudan, Riyadh has supported the Sudanese Armed Forces while the UAE has thrown its weight behind the rival Rapid Support Forces. If it weren’t for this division, the world’s most vicious war “might not have lasted so long”. Since 2018, the UAE has provided substantial investment and weapons to the Ethiopian government, which now looks poised to spark a full-blown war with Eritrea to regain access to the Red Sea via its ports. Eritrea, meanwhile, has been engaging with Saudi officials. Even when MBS and MBZ are theoretically on the same side, as in Yemen, they fail to co-operate, “helping draw out the misery and bloodshed”. This rift isn’t just hindering the two countries’ own interests, it is also abetting in the demolition of a vast region that’s home to more than 250 million people.

I’ve spent the past few years visiting the planet’s strangest, most mysterious, “and sometimes horrifying” bodies of water, says Geo Rutherford in The Washington Post. Last year I dripped with sweat as I stood alongside the Peruvian Amazon’s “Boiling River”, where the 100C water froths and roils and where I “dipped my mug into the torrent to make a cup of tea”. Then there’s the River Congo, winding through the Central African rainforest, which has such impenetrable currents that fish living on opposite sides of the same stretch have evolved into entirely different species. Spain’s “neon orange” Rio Tinto is so acidic that NASA scientists study the few species that can bear it for clues about how life might survive on Mars. And North America’s Lake Superior is full of centuries-old “preserved corpses”. The drowned bodies from violent storms have been embalmed as the near-freezing fresh water turned their human tissue into a wax-like substance, keeping them intact for hundreds of years.

John F Kennedy is often held up as a superlative president, says Laurence Leamer in his new book Ladies’ Man. But behind closed doors, the 35th US president was an abhorrent philanderer. He took the virginity of a 19-year-old intern called Marion Beardsley during her first week in the White House and installed his mistress Diana de Vegh as a White House researcher so they could easily slink off to the Lincoln Bedroom for quickies. “It was chit and chat,” she recalled, “then some sex and go home.” Often his compulsive sexuality put his presidency in danger. In his first few months in office he unknowingly shared a mistress with a Chicago mafia chieftain, and he later slept with Ellen Rometsch – a glamorous model married to a West German diplomat – who was suspected of being an East German spy.

Whispers about Kennedy’s sexual proclivities were everywhere, but rarely made it into the mainstream press – most saw no reason to let his infidelity cast a shadow over his “achievements as a statesman”. But they reveal a disturbing side to his character. Shortly before Jackie Kennedy was due to give birth to their first child, JFK treated himself to a yacht trip around the Mediterranean with a number of young women including “a stunning but not particularly intelligent blonde” known as “Pooh”. When Jackie haemorrhaged and the baby was stillborn, Kennedy didn’t even consider returning home until a friend rang a few days later and said to him: “If you want to run for president, you’d better get your ass back to your wife’s bedside.”

Ladies’ Man: The Careless Heart of John F Kennedy by Laurence Leamer is available to buy here.