Westerners writing about their gap year in Africa should be aware of the risks by now. After Gap Yah guy’s satire of his time in “Tanzaniaaa”, “Africaaa”, where he actually saw someone contract “Malariaaa”, travellers have had to think carefully about how they talk about their year abroad.

At best they risk ridicule. At worst they will be accused of colonialism, cultural blindness and perpetuating an outdated narrative of the developing world for their own means.

But no one seemed to have warned Louise Linton, whose article “How my dream gap year in Africa turned into a nightmare” appeared in the Telegraph this week to promote a book about her experience.

Despite being in Zambia, she writes about becoming a “central character” in the Congolese war of the late 1990s – terrified of what the rebels from across the border “would do to the ‘skinny white muzungu with long angel hair’”.

First, I want to say to everyone who actually believed there was something to the e-mail scandal: I’m sorry that you were lied to. I don’t want this post to be a victory lap or an “I told you so” post, because the issue we’re dealing with is serious, and deserves serious thought.

What this whole story reveals is that we have a problem with churnalism. The reporters, writers, and journalists who bring us news are so understaffed that they don’t actually have time to fact check their own reporting. What most reporters do right now is just re-word whatever press release they’ve been handed. If you were someone who believed the oft-repeated lies told about the facts in this case, I’m sorry. But recognize that we don’t have effective news companies anymore, even in the new media space. In new media, people are often just re-wording what someone else previously re-worded. There’s no actual reporting.

And as citizen journalists, the lot of you are actually capable of picking up a phone and calling someone who’s the subject of a story, or an expert. Just tell them you’re a blogger, and e-mail them the resulting post. I’ve done that. I think the rest of you should consider doing it, too.

I wrote months ago that the only possible charges to bring against Clinton would be civil, and internal to the state department, requiring a sit down meeting with the president whose job it would have been to decide whether any sanction was necessary.

The end to Bernie’s campaign is likely the best example of turning a win into a loss I have ever seen. Some are calling it an extreme case of ‘white privilege‘ and sexism.

Lauren Rankin writes “If Bernie Sanders is such a progressive revolutionary, why does he insist on undermining an eminently qualified female presidential candidate who can beat a fascistic demagogue?” She goes on to write “Moving the Democratic platform to the left is a laudable goal, but it isn’t one that he alone has led. There have been many movements, including the movement to end the Hyde Amendment, the “Fight for 15,” and the #BlackLivesMatter movement, that have pushed the Democratic Party to the left. But Bernie Sanders is presenting it as if he himself is the leader of this progressive revolution, as if he and his candidacy have been doing all of the work. This is privileged ignorance at best, and sinister appropriation at worst. Sanders has constructed himself as the progressive revolutionary savior that we have all been waiting for, a privileged and entitled point of view if there ever was one. He is unwilling to stop mansplaining to the country that he’s right because either he believes so deeply that he is right and we are wrong or does he sense that this is the one time that he will ever be this relevant to American politics and his male ego is unwilling to let this go?” I go with the last explanation.

Hillary Clinton is probably the most prepared person to ever run for President. She is brilliant and hardworking. She has worked for The Children’s Defense Fund and a Congressional Committee. Been recognized as one of the top 100 lawyers in the country; was First Lady of Arkansas; First Lady of the United States; two-term Senator from New York; and Secretary of State.

For twenty-five years Republicans have attacked her and spent over a billion dollars of their and the governments money trying to prove Hillary is evil and dishonest without ever proving anything. Yet the attacks have left their mark and a majority today wrongly see her as dishonest and untrustworthy. Still Clinton leads Trump by more than two-to-one when people are asked who is more prepared to be President.

"We all carry around implicit attitudes based on how we have understood the way the world works as we grow up and if you never see a certain kind of person in a certain job, and all of a sudden somebody who looks or sounds like that shows up, you go 'Oh, wait a minute. Who are you? You don't belong here,' " she said.

She said she believes this is a factor in some of the criticism of Clinton, who was First Lady to former U.S. president Bill Clinton when Campbell first met her at the G7 Summit in Tokyo in 1993.

"Things that people hate about her ... are kind of small potatoes, compared to other people who have run for public office," said Campbell, who then mentioned the email scandal and the attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi.

"You're looking for the way to be able to say 'Aha! You see? That's why I'm not going to vote for her.' But underlying it is really this sense of discomfort that 'I've never voted for somebody like that for president.' "

We are a week in, and every therapy session has started with Brexit. They’ve stayed with it, too. The shock, the fear, the dismay, the feelings of shame, of being unsafe, of being misplaced and unwanted. Notions of what the UK has stood for in people’s consciousness are being shredded. The vote experienced as an assault on senses of self, of identity and community that people didn’t know they carried inside of them and relied upon until the vote shattered it.

People express anger and despair. The image of where they lived, and what the country has meant to them, is pushing them to consider what kind of fantasy they (and, of course, many of us) have lived with until it came crashing down a week ago. Were they delusional, some ask, to not see the level of alienation and despair that has gripped so much of the country? Were they living in a fairytale in which despite the woes of the last years, it all works out in the end? Were they themselves complicit in a make-believe in which politicians can kick the EU and then expect people to support it? Has Britain become the kind of family in which one side is not talking to the other? There is too, a dirtiness, a sense of having cleaved to an alliance with people they didn’t necessarily like while disdaining the political rhetoric of the other side. Yes, these are Remainers, for the most part. But lest you wonder, my practice is metropolitan, cosmopolitan, London-based, but it isn’t essentially middle-class or Guardian-reading.

The alienations and sorrows that drove people to therapy in the first place are writ large in Brexit. Questions of insecurity and belonging are uppermost; do I have a place, do we have a place, how unbearable that others don’t feel they have a place. These sentiments from the consulting room include a concern for self, rage and worry, mixed with concern for those on the other side. For some, the same psychological factors that led them to disown or split off unwelcome parts of themselves, or to repress them or project them on to others, rebound in Brexit darkness. A few have said: there are parts of myself that I don’t want to know about, and there are parts of my country (or the country) I live in that are showing me a darkness I would rather suppress.

In this sense, Brexit, with its foreboding of irreversibility (although who knows on that one), has brought people into a confrontation with self, with helplessness. For some, there has been the expression of a desire to act, to be counted in a more profound way. Equally, there is fright and consternation about a racism now given oxygen. The barely visible, the shadow, is being seen and it is unwelcome. It has released a shockwave as people recognise that the political really is the personal, and that what is personal – what counts as a response to alienation in some of the Brexiters – is the ugliness of othering the foreign, the newly arrived, the people who are displaced from home. The starkness of this recognition, in the taunts and daubings and attacks that show a fear of the other, are sobering and scary. It hurts to know how powerful and how close to the surface such feelings are, and it is crucial that we contest the underlying terms of a political debate in which racism is acceptable expression of powerlessness. By contrast, it has shocked people to see the nakedness of political power, the House of Cards moves played out in plain view as though politics were a game, even a playpen, with leadership, stewardship and inclusivity barely on the table.

As we have done since 2004, we are taking a polls-only approach to give a daily snapshot of the race – as well as a November prediction. This approach has an effective precision of a few tenths of a percentage point of public opinion, and performs very well as both a tracker and a forecast. Currently, the probability of a Hillary Clinton victory in November is 85 percent, based on polls alone.

Today, I give a brief tour of the computational approach.

The Meta-Analysis starts with a Python script that downloads recent state polls from the Huffington Post’s Pollster operation. Thanks to Natalie Jackson, the HuffPollster team, and dozens of pollsters for this stream of information, which forms the foundation of the calculation.

Where polls are not available, we use the election result from 2012. As I have written, this year’s Clinton-versus-Trump state polls are strongly correlated with 2012?s Obama-versus-Romney polls. Because no realignment is evident, past results are a good predictor of the likely outcome this year. At the moment, no more than fourteen states are genuinely in play.

Hillary Clinton will travel to Atlantic City on Wednesday to attack Donald Trump for what a campaign official called the “wake of destruction” his business dealings left in the seaside resort.

Trump casinos went through bankruptcy twice in the 1990s, and his companies left a legion of local contractors hanging with their bills unpaid. Clinton also is expected to talk about Trump University, a venture that promised to teach people the secrets of real-estate wealth and is now the subject of lawsuits for fraud.

The location and time of Clinton’s Atlantic City appearance have not yet been finalized, the campaign said. The former secretary of state is also scheduled to campaign in Scranton on Friday with Vice President Biden.

Foreign leaders have made no secret of their disdain for Donald Trump — and now French President Francois Hollande has made it explicit, endorsing Hillary Clinton for the White House.

"The best thing the Democrats can do is to get Hillary Clinton elected," Hollande wrote in a column for a French newspaper, according to a translation by Politico.

Trump, meanwhile, offers slogans that are "barely different from the extreme right in Europe and in France," and electing him “would complicate relations between Europe and the U.S.," Hollande wrote.

It is unusual for a foreign leader to make such an explicit endorsement in a U.S. presidential election.