Navy: Progress on warship fire, but ship’s fate uncertain

SAN DIEGO — Marking significant progress, firefighters were able to move deeper inside the fire-engulfed USS Bonhomme Richard on Tuesday on their third day of battling the flames. But a top Navy official said it was too soon to say if the 23-year-old ship that is burning on opposite ends will be salvageable.

Navy officials were able to inspect four main engineering rooms and found no major damage, and the external structure of the ship appears to be safe, said Rear Adm. Philip Sobeck, the commander of the strike group whose flagship is the USS Bonhomme Richard.

TAHOE CITY — California’s popular Squaw Valley Ski Resort is considering changing its name to remove the word “squaw” — a derogatory term for Native American women — amid a national reckoning over racial injustice and inequality.

The word “squaw,” derived from the Algonquin language, may have once simply meant “woman,” but over generations, the word morphed into a misogynist and racist term to disparage indigenous women, said Vanessa Esquivido, a professor of American Indian Studies at California State University, Chico.

“That word is an epithet and a slur. It’s been a slur for a very long time,” she said.

When settlers arrived in the 1850s in the area where the Sierra Nevada mountain resort is now located, they first saw only Native American women working in a meadow. The land near Lake Tahoe was believed to have been given the name Squaw Valley by those early settlers.