... 1908 (100 years ago today), in Paris, a daughter, given the name Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand, was born to a woman of bourgeois upbringing and her husband, a legal secretary. Educated at private Catholic schools, at age 14 the daughter began a lifelong commitment to atheism. As a student at the Sorbonne Simone de Beauvoir took 2d place in the 1929 agrégation examination in philosophy, "barely losing to Jean-Paul Sartre who took first (it was his second attempt at the exam)." The 2 began a storied and lifelong partnership. Perhaps the most noted of Beauvoir's many books is Le Deuxième Sexe, her 1947 work of "philosophy on women from a feminist perspective." Following her death in 1986, Beauvoir (above right) was buried beside Sartre in Paris' Montparnasse cemetery.... 1964, 21 Panamanians were killed while protesting U.S. control of the Panama Canal, an event marked in the country to this day as Martyr's Day. On this day in 1990, U.S. troops again were in the country, having toppled the government of Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega 3 weeks earlier.
