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By Sofía Hanalei Sanchez

New York (CNN) — On a cool, wintry afternoon in early March, a crowd of people streamed towards New York’s Washington Square Park for a Miley Cyrus lookalike contest.

Many in the audience were die-hard Hannah Montana fans, including Iranian-American cousins, Sophia, 23, and Ariana Parizadeh, 22. Growing up the children of immigrants in strict households, they remembered childhoods spent secretly watching Hannah Montana’s double-life unfold, her days split between being a regular girl and a pop star, and how it reminded them of their own lives as they navigated home life and school.

“Going between home and school, I felt like I had to code switch,” Sophia said. At home, she and her cousin spoke Farsi, and were encouraged to become doctors or lawyers. At school, they spoke English and tried to fit in like any other child.

“I felt there were different personality traits of mine that came to light in both situations,” she said, recalling summers spent in Iran. “Coming back here when school started, I was also a different version of myself.”

Disney Channel’s “Hannah Montana” debuted in 2006, and millions of children were forever changed by the tween girl with Tennessee roots secretly leading a double life as an international pop star in Malibu. A 20th anniversary special, starring a now 33-year-old Miley Cyrus, debuted Tuesday on Disney+.

Had the show been made in 2026, the cast may have been more racially diverse and the plot lines might have revolved less around boys. But what remains clear is that Hannah Montana took kids’ and tweens’ dimensions seriously, stretching the star’s appeal far past gender, culture or race and finding home even with those who looked or spoke nothing like her. The little girls and boys that once donned blonde wigs as child fans are now young adults reflecting on how the pop star’s duality informed their identity and secrets, too.

“She was white and I was Black, but that awkward teen stage of kind of figuring yourself out with your father and your friends and also dealing with all the pressures from the world and rumors — all that was still really prevalent and important to me as a kid,” said Katrina “Kitty” Black, a Jamaican-American fan who is now 29.

Black recalled singing at her Jamaican church in Stamford, Conn. nearly every day of the week before taking a ten-minute drive to the ritzy Greenwich County Day School where she was one of the few Black girls on a scholarship.

“That’s the codeswitching piece of it,” Black said. “I kind of felt like there was dramatic music playing where it’s like, ‘If only they knew,’ you know what I mean? That show just hit because you’re at that age where you’re really trying to find yourself in your voice.”

For Black, Hannah’s wig — which the character would put on or take off depending on which persona she was inhabiting — itself took on a dual meaning. Seeing Miley transform into a more confident version of herself just by switching into straighter, longer hair echoes a message Black and Brown girls have often worked hard to unlearn.

“Sometimes in order to fit into certain spaces, you put on this wig,” Black said. ”In retrospect now, it’s not something that I love the messaging of because I don’t think that’s what they were saying, but it did hit home because you kind of are juggling two different worlds.”

The show’s creators appear aware of the impact they’ve had. “I am very proud to have co-created and executive produced a series with such an important message,” wrote Michael Poryes in an Instagram post. “Wanting people, as well as yourself, to like you for who you truly are was and continues to be a vital message and was at the heart of the series pilot and every episode that followed.”

‘The Other Side of Me’

Growing up in the belt b

By Hadas Gold, CNN

(CNN) — OpenAI is winding down Sora, the video generation app it launched to much fanfare last year that signaled a bigger push into creative tools and social media.

OpenAI is shuttering the standalone app to focus on other priorities, the company said on Tuesday.

“As we focus and compute demand grows, the Sora research team continues to focus on world simulation research to advance robotics that will help people solve real-world, physical tasks,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement.

The company added it needed to make trade-offs on products that have high compute costs.

Sora, OpenAI’s first standalone app after ChatGPT, rose to the top of the iPhone’s App Store soon after its September launch. But copyright holders quickly raised concerns over the use of their intellectual property and people’s likenessnes on the platform. And some critics said the app contributed to misinformation and “AI slop.”

OpenAI struck a deal with Disney in December that allowed its characters to be part of user-generated AI videos on Sora.

A source familiar with the matter said the deal between Disney and OpenAI isn’t proceeding given OpenAI’s change in direction.

“We respect OpenAI’s decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere,” a Disney spokesperson said in a statement to CNN. The company added that it “will continue to engage with AI platforms to find new ways to meet fans where they are while responsibly embracing new technologies that respect IP and the rights of creators.”

OpenAI is “exploring ways to support export and preservation” of user’s content from the app, the company said in a post on Sora.

OpenAI is diverting efforts from disparate consumer products and toward products more geared toward business clients, the Wall Street Journal previously reported.

The company faces increased competition from Anthropic, which operates the popular Claude Code product that has long been a favorite among software programmers, and Google, which grabbed headlines with recent advancements in its video generation model.

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By Jackie Wattles, CNN

(CNN) — NASA’s new chief is reshaping the space agency’s goals, unveiling at an event in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday an ambitious vision that includes revamped plans for a moon base.

While the space agency has long had its sights set on creating a settlement on the moon for astronauts to live and work more permanently, Tuesday marked the first time NASA has revealed a timeline and road map for such efforts.

“The moon base will not appear overnight,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said at the event, called Ignition. “We will invest approximately $20 billion over the next seven years and build it through dozens of missions.”

It was not immediately clear how much of the $20 billion NASA could divert from other projects or how much new funding would be required.

Some other projects announced Tuesday by Isaacman, who took office in December, would have much tighter deadlines, most notably a brand-new nuclear-powered Mars vehicle the agency hopes to launch by 2028 — a lightning-fast timeline in the world of space travel.

The pathway to funding these innovations and bringing them to fruition is largely unclear and not without friction. But they offer key insights into the transformative plans mapped out by Isaacman, who aims to inject a sense of urgency into NASA’s scientific and human spaceflight pursuits.

Shelving a lunar space station

Since stepping into his role, Isaacman has been working to implement bold changes — from announcing a push to hire workers and bolster NASA’s “core competencies” to setting up a new mission that’s effectively a precursor to the next astronaut moon landing. And he has struck a notably more aspirational and transformative tone than many of his predecessors.

Tuesday marked his most extensive effort yet to convey that enterprising vision.

“If we concentrate NASA’s extraordinary resources on the objectives of the National Space Policy, clear away needless obstacles that impede progress, and unleash the workforce and industrial might of our nation and partners,” Isaacman said, “then returning to the moon and building a base will seem pale in comparison to what we will be capable of accomplishing in the years ahead.”

Among the flurry of announcements Isaacman made Tuesday was the revelation that NASA will pause plans to work with international partners to develop a space station to orbit the moon, called Gateway.

Envisioned as a means of supporting trips to the lunar surface as well as missions to farther destinations, the Gateway space station would have served a stop-off point in the moon’s orbit to coordinate trips for cargo and people.

The agency will instead put existing Gateway resources to use in other ways, including building the lunar base.

“Significant parts of exiting Gateway hardware and facilities can be directly repurposed to support near-term exploration objectives along with those orbital elements needed to support a surface-focused mission,” according to Carlos Garcia-Galan, NASA’s Moon Base program executive.

Isaacman has said NASA will also work to drastically increase the number of robotic landers carrying cargo and science instruments to the moon — aiming to make landings a monthly occurrence. For context, NASA and its commercial partners have sent four landers toward the moon since January 2024 with varying degrees of success.

Ramped-up robotic missions would work in tandem with the crewed missions of NASA’s Artemis program, the effort to return astronauts to the moon’s surface for the first time in half a century, to lay the groundwork for a lunar settlement.

The first crewed mission of the Artemis prog

By Devan Cole, CNN

(CNN) — A federal prosecutor in Washington, DC, told a judge this month that his office didn’t have evidence of any crimes by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell in a costly renovation of the central bank’s headquarters – despite subpoenas over the matter, which the judge later quashed.

At a high-stakes hearing on March 3, the prosecutor, George A. Massucco-LaTaif, was asked, “What evidence is there of fraud or criminal misconduct in relation to the renovations?”

“We do not know at this time,” Massucco-LaTaif responded, according to a now-unsealed transcript of the court proceedings. “However, there are 1.2 billion reasons for us to look into it.”

The Department of Justice’s criminal investigation into Powell in January came after months of railing by President Donald Trump against Powell for not lowering interest rates faster. Trump’s complaints ranged from personal insults against the banker to accusations of impropriety and incompetence in cost overruns in the $2.5 billion Fed renovation.

The DOJ probe heightened fears that the administration wants to erode the Fed’s independence, which could leave the door open for political interference in setting interest rates for the world’s largest economy.

Massucco-LaTaif pushed back strongly on March 3 when Boasberg, an appointee of President Barack Obama, asked whether prosecutors could submit such evidence of a crime to him under seal. Massucco-LaTaif argued such a move was unnecessary because “you don’t need this grand suspicion of illegal activity,” according to the court transcript.

“It can be something as simple as a tip or a rumor or something that just doesn’t seem right,” he said, adding later: “I would submit to the Court that a $1.2 billion overrun of cost… doesn’t seem right.”

Massucco-LaTaif told Boasberg: “$1.2 billion, that’s the GDP of some smaller countries, yet we are going to overlook it as, oh, it’s just overrun because it’s a historical building? That doesn’t seem right.”

“And are we prohibited from looking into it? That would seem to, you know, put a chilling effect on any investigation the government ever did,” he added, according to the transcript.

Powell had stayed mostly mum in the face of Trump’s attacks, but just a few days after he was served with a subpoena in early January, the Fed chief released a remarkable video calling the investigation part of political pressure campaign.

The week after Massucco-LaTaif’s remarks, Boasberg quashed the subpoenas. In a stinging ruling, he said the government “produced essentially zero evidence to suspect Chair Powell of a crime.”

“Indeed, its justifications are so thin and unsubstantiated that the Court can only conclude that they are pretextual,” he wrote.

Powell’s term as chair expires in May, and Trump in January nominated former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh to run the central bank. But Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, a key vote on the Senate Banking Committee that would confirm the nomination, has said the committee should not consider a vote until the criminal probe of Powell is resolved.

The Washington Post first reported the prosecutors’ remarks from a court transcript Tuesday.

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