BLOG IS SCREWED UP BY WP TEXT WIDGETS AND THE “&” IN MY POSTS – PLEASE HELP

I think I figured out what was happening, but I don’t know why exactly.

I tried starting my whole blog over again – scrapped the last one completely – signed up for a new wordpress account and started with a completely new theme – Atahualpa. And exactly the same thing happened. Everything seemed to be going ok until I started installing text widgets in the sidebar. After I had installed them on the left and right sidebar my pages other than my home page got all screwed up again – the sidebars were sitting below the text and the text was in one of the sidebars. The right sidebar spanned from the center column all the way to the right sidebar.

I looked at https://www.validator.w3.org to see whether my site: https://www.Lancesview.com would validate. And it did not. There were tons of errors. Most of them were related to a “&” symbol being wrong. I used it in my postings and meta tags and supposedly that was causing some of the issues.
The validator also said that I had improper code in my text boxes: I had links to amazon for some books I was recommending and apparently whatever I did, it did not like. It worked when I clicked on the links so I don’t understand.
I had something like this in the text widget:

<a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.ca/Atlas-Shrugged-Leonard-Peikoff/dp/0452011876/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1252792056&sr=8-1-spell>Atlas Shrugged</a>

I also had some links in my postings which the validator did not seem to like. Something like:

<a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a>.

and:

<a target="_blank" href="https://support.apple.com/kb/ht3669">Products Compatible with Snow Leopard.</a>

and:

`Canon drivers.‘

I do not understand how all these things could screw up my blog so badly. What am I doing wrong?
Please help me. I have spent about 30 hours over the past few days trying to fix my blog and I have no idea what I’m doing. It shouldn’t be this difficult on wordpress!

Thanks

Lance