Actress Melissa Joan Hart recently opened up about her faith journey, a “Holy Spirit moment” that helped her to understand the Trinity, and how her recent work with a faith-based organization, World Vision, has changed her perspective on the power of prayer.
The Hollywood veteran has been outspoken about her faith in Christ for several years. Although she is best known for starring in 1990s TV shows likeSabrina the Teenage Witch, Clarissa Explains It All, and Melissa & Joey, her quiet devotion to God has become as she describes “deeper and closer and more fulfilling.”
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Hart, who was raised Catholic, began attending a Presbyterian church after meeting her husband, Mark Wilkerson, who was a Baptist.
But The Masked Singer performer told the Christian Post that she recently had a “born-again” moment that helped her to understand the Trinity.
“I did have a born-again, Holy Spirit moment,” Hart shared. “I never really understood the Holy Spirit or the Trinity in a sense. One day, we were in Bible study and it just hit, like the Holy Spirit made sense to me all of a sudden!”
“One day, I just felt it and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s the Holy Spirit talking to me. I get it now,’” she recounted. “Like a lightning bolt just hit me and I was like, ‘The Holy Spirit! I don’t know why it just hit me and I got it.’ Then I better understood the Trinity and all that.”
She shared withCBNthat prayer plays an important role in her life and her career, even though at one point she wanted to give up on it.
“I think that all through my life faith has always been there for me. As I talk to myself as I go through my day, I’m always going to God. It’s never just me talking to myself. I’m always talking to God about what the best course of action would be in a particular situation,” Hart said.
“I’m constantly asking the Holy Spirit to calm me down and quiet me. Being upset about something isn’t going to get me there any faster. I’m constantly just finding little moments throughout the day to spend with God,” she said.
Hart added, “Of course, I fall to my knees when I come to a real crossroads when I have a major conflict in my life or something that is really on my heart. As a family, we make it a habit to go to church every Sunday. We don’t show any shame in our faith. Prayer is just a very important part of our family. Faith is all very much an important part of our lives.”
The mom of three says she has even learned how to handle anxiety through prayer.
“I actually wanted to stop praying for a while because I was having such terrible thoughts that would frighten me so badly,” she confessed. “I was like, ‘I’m not gonna pray anymore because I can’t handle these thoughts. It’s giving me anxiety. It’s keeping me from sleeping. It’s like, literally choking me with how scared it’s making me. When I pray, these other thoughts are coming in. And that’s when I realized that Satan is trying to take over so I have to keep doing it!”
“I fought through it and that doesn’t happen anymore,” Hart recalled. View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Melissa Joan Hart (@melissajoanhart)
Hart has put her faith into action in a variety of ways, even partnering with World Vision, a Christian humanitarian organization, over the years.
In June, she worked with the organization to help provide clean water to the people of Zambia.
She says that while she was there she had a conversation about prayer that changed her perspective.
“It’s a Christian country and almost every household we went to they were praying with us. But they couldn’t understand why we pray,” Hart said.
“They couldn’t understand why we pray when we have so much. They’re like, ‘It’s weird to see a family pray that already has everything, like what would you pray for, or how would you pray?’” she continued.
“Sometimes I think, in our country, we hear people more likely say, ‘Why would I pray, everything’s a wreck? Everything’s falling apart around me. God doesn’t care. Why would I pray?’” Hart illustrated. “But what they’re doing, they’re like: ‘Well, we need to pray because we need our goats to be healthy. We need rain to come but not too much. We need our crops to do well. We need our children to be healthy. We need our school to be improved.”
Hart says through the ups and downs of her career she has learned to depend on Jesus.
“One of the great things that I’ve learned is that darkness is just the absence of light and without Jesus, you just have this darkness and then Jesus is the light… so not having Jesus in your life just leaves this void,” she said.
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It is a trade deal that will “rebalance, but enable trade on both sides,” said Ursula von der Leyen after the EU and US struck a trade deal in Scotland.
It was not the most emphatic declaration by the president of the European Commission.
The trading partnership between two of the biggest markets in the world is in significantly worse shape than it was before Donald Trump was elected, but this deal is better than nothing.
As part of the agreement, European exports to the US will be hit with a 15% tariff. That’s better than the 30% the bloc was threatened with but it is a world away from the type of open and free trade European leaders would like. The EU had offered tariff free trade to the US just weeks before the deal was announced.
Instead, it has accepted a 15% tariff and agreed to ramp up its energy purchases from the US.
The EU tariff on US imports will remain close to zero but Europe did get some important exemptions – on aviation, critical raw materials, some chemicals and some medical equipment. That being said, the bloc did not achieve a breakthrough on steel, aluminium or copper, which are still facing a 50% tariff. It means the average tariff on EU exports to the US will now rise from 1.2 % last year to 17%.
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There is also confusion over the status of pharmaceuticals – an important industry to Europe. Products like Ozempic, which is made in Denmark, have flooded into the US market in recent years and Donald Trump was threatening tariffs as high as 50% on the sector.
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US and EU agree trade deal
It appears that pharmaceuticals will fall under the 15% bracket, even though President Trump contradicted official announcements by suggesting a deal had not yet been made on the industry. The risk is that the implementation of the deal could be beset with differences of interpretation, as has been the case with the Japan deal that Trump struck last week.
It also risks fracturing solidarity between EU states, all of which have different strategic industries that rely on the US to differing degrees. Germany’s BDI federation of industrial groups said: “Even a 15% tariff rate will have immense negative effects on export-oriented German industry.”
The VCI chemical trade association said rates were still “too high”. For German carmakers, including Mercedes and BMW, there was some reprieve from the crippling 27.5% tariff imposed by Trump. The industry is Europe’s top exporter to the US but the German trade body, the VDA, warned that a 15% rate would “cost the German automotive industry billions annually”.
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Who’s the winner in the US-EU trade deal?
Meanwhile, François Bayrou, the French Prime Minister, described the agreement as a “dark day” for the union, “when an alliance of free peoples, gathered to affirm their values and defend their interests, resolves to submission.”
While the deal has divided the bloc, the greater certainty it delivers is not to be snubbed at.
Markets bounced on the news, even though the deal will ultimately harm economic growth.
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‘Millions’ of EU jobs were in firing line
Analysts at Oxford Economics said: “We don’t plan material changes to our eurozone baseline forecast of 1.1% GDP growth this year and 0.8% in 2026 in response to the EU-US trade deal.
“While the effective tariff rate will end up at around 15%, a few percentage points higher than in our baseline, lower uncertainty and no EU retaliation are partial offsets.”
However, economists at Capital Economics said the economic outlook had now deteriorated, with growth in the bloc likely to drop by 0.2%. Germany and Ireland could be the hardest hit.
While the US appears to be the obvious winner in this negotiation, uncertainty still hangs over the US economy.
Trump has not achieved his goal of “90 deals in 90 days” and, in the end, American consumers could still bear the cost through higher prices.
That of course depends on how businesses share the burden of those higher costs, with the latest data suggesting that inflation is yet to rip through the US economy. While Europe determined on Sunday that a bad deal is better than no deal, some fear that the worst is yet to come for the Americans.
The long-promised “more affordable” Tesla model has been spied on Chinese social media, and it’s disappointingly about what we expected: a slightly decontented version of the Model Y.
For many years, Tesla had planned to build a much more affordable vehicle, starting around $25k. This vehicle was nicknamed the “Model 2,” and would have offered the most affordable entry point into the EV market, at least in the West.
In its place, Tesla started offering vague promises about “more affordable models, starting in its Q1 report in April 2024. Tesla later specified that these would enter production in the first half of 2025.
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The language Tesla used suggested that the cheaper vehicles would be “new models,” which means more than one model, and not just based on a current Tesla model. But we reported that this was unlikely to be the case, and that the “new models” would just be a stripped-down Model Y.
So, we’ve got confirmation that actual new models aren’t coming – but it does seem like something cheaper is coming down the pipe. And now, from Chinese social media pics of these “first builds,” we know just what kind of decontenting Tesla will do in order to get the cost savings.
Two videos were posted this weekend, on bilibili and weibo. The first was an exterior video by account “极客小猪” (machine translated as “Geek Piglet”). You’ll have to click through if you want to see the whole thing.
Parked side by side with a Juniper Model Y, the two models seem similar in length
It shows the new Model Y as similar in size to the Juniper refreshed model it’s parked next to, though the front and rear are covered by camouflage and it’s hard to tell with perspective of the camera.
As best we can tell from the captions (which isn’t very well), the account seems to think this might be the upcoming larger Model Y L, and the camera perspective in the particular screeenshot above does make it look like the car in the forefront could be slightly longer than the one in the back. But other perspectives show them looking similar in length, and seeing the various missing parts later in the video, we think it’s likely the “more affordable” model.
There are a few holes in the camouflage that give som indication of what might be different, like that the rear light bar from the Juniper might be cut off rather than running across the whole rear of the car. The new one is also missing the “T E S L A” logo across the rear, as can be seen in a little window showing the rear camera.
The video gets a look at the interior of the vehicle, where the seats are covered up. I originally suspected the vehicle might have cloth seats, but the cover seems to have dropped down in the rear, and something leather-like is showing through, so Tesla may still be using its fake leather product to cover the seats.
It also shows that the center console is cut off between the armrest and the screen, using up less material and giving an open space there. This is somewhat similar to the original design of the Model S, which had a large space in front of the center console. We can’t tell from the video if the 2 phone charging mats are still present or not – it looks like the space they’d normally go is there, but the pattern looks different than the current NFC phone chargers.
For another look at the interior, we saw a couple more photos from another Chinese social media account, 42号车库, or “Garage No. 42” on Weibo. These show the steering wheel, front seats, rear and roof a little more clearly. It seems to be of the same car, given the status of the seat covers in the rear.
More changes become apparent here: there is no panoramic glass roof on the car, and the rear screen which was added in the Juniper refresh is once again eliminated. But the turn signal stalk, which was eliminated in the Model 3 Highland refresh and returned in a vestigial manner in the Juniper refresh, is (thankfully) still there.
The balance of these changes suggest that a lot of them are just rollbacks of the content which was added to the cars in the Juniper refresh. Interestingly, though, the Juniper refresh did not increase the price of the car significantly. So, rolling back those changes shouldn’t decrease the price of the car all that much either.
But these just show us some of the interior and exterior changes – the model might have other changes as well. From time to time, Tesla has offered cheaper versions of its vehicles either with rear-wheel drive only, to save on the cost of the front motor, or with a smaller or cheaper (e.g. LFP) battery. The new “affordable” Model Y might incorporate those changes too, and be able to get cost down more because of it, but we’ll have to wait for more information on that.
Further, there’s been no indication of a cheaper Model 3 or any actual “new models” yet. Model 3 is a smaller car than the Model Y, and thus could be cheaper – if Tesla is saving a significant amount of money by cutting a little plastic out of a center console, surely cutting hundreds of pounds of aluminum would save even more. We had expected the “more affordable models” to include both a stripped-down Model 3 and Model Y, but per Musk’s comments on the call, we might only be getting a Model Y.
Maybe it would be nice to have someone in charge who takes the mission of sustainable transport seriously. Which Musk does not, and has in fact acted against with his recent actions.
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The European Central Bank may rely on regulated euro stablecoins and private innovation to counter the dominance of US dollar stablecoins, says adviser Jürgen Schaaf.