Khadijah Farrakhan, longtime wife of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, died Saturday, the Nation of Islam has announced. She was 90.
“Mother Khadijah” worked alongside her provocative and charismatic husband for decades, helping lead their religious and sociopolitical movement, which espouses Black self-reliance. Its home base was Mosque Maryam on the South Side of Chicago, where the couple lived.
“The Honorable Minister @LouisFarrakhan with deep sadness yet with profound gratitude to Allah informs you that his beloved wife of 72 years, the first lady of the Nation of Islam, Mother Khadijah has returned to Allah (may Allah be pleased),” a statement by the Shura Executive Council said.
Her death came seven months after devotees had marked Khadijah’s 90th birthday. The statement said funeral services are to be announced.
Mosque Maryam remembered her as “a devoted follower” with “a precious soul, a sweet heart.”
In a post on Facebook, R&B artist ZaRio Son Rise recalled her as “a true queen, a righteous woman, and one of the greatest examples of dignity, faith, loyalty, and grace our generation has ever witnessed.”
Born Betsy Ross, Khadijah Farrakhan married her husband, then named Louis Walcott, in Boston on Sept. 12, 1953. The two had nine children. Their eldest son, Louis Farrakhan Jr., died in 2018, and another son, Joshua Farrakhan, died in 2023.
Khadijah Farrakhan converted to Islam in 1955, the same year that her husband joined the Chicago-based movement after being heavily influenced by Malcolm X, his friend from Boston. The pair changed their names around that time.
Louis Farrakhan, who is now 93, stepped into the organization’s leadership vacuum shortly after Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965. Among his most significant accomplishments was the Million Man March on Washington in 1995.
Two years later, Khadijah Farrakhan spoke before a gathering of America’s Black women in Philadelphia dubbed the Million Woman March.
“A nation can rise no higher than its women,” she told the crowd. “We focus on women, but cannot lose sight that we must rise as a family — men, women and children.”
A TV screen shows a live broadcast of former first lady Kim Keon Hee’s bribery trial at Seoul Station on Friday. Kim was sentenced to seven years in prison. Photo by Yonhap
A Seoul court on Friday sentenced former first lady Kim Keon Hee to seven years in prison for taking expensive gifts in return for job appointments and business favors.
The Seoul Central District Court handed down the sentence to Kim, the wife of ousted former President Yoon Suk Yeol, after she was indicted on charges of accepting bribes for mediation, including over 100 million won (US$64,750) worth of jewelry in exchange for a government job for a son-in-law of a construction company chairman.
In total, she was charged with taking approximately 300 million won worth of gifts, and the court found her guilty on all counts.
“The defendant disregarded the social responsibilities associated with the position of first lady and used it merely as a means to pursue her private interests,” presiding judge Cho Sun-pyo said during the hearing, which was televised live.
Kim was indicted in December on charges of receiving a Van Cleef & Arpels necklace and other jewelry from the construction company chairman between March and May 2022; a golden turtle ornament in April 2022 from Lee Bae-yong, former head of the National Education Commission, in exchange for her appointment; a Dior bag worth 5.4 million won from a pastor the same year; and a Vacheron Constantin watch from another businessperson in September 2022.
In February 2023, she was accused of receiving a painting by renowned artist Lee Ufan from a former prosecutor in return for her help in securing him a nomination for an election.
The exchanges mostly took place during the period her husband was in office from May 2022 until his ouster in April 2025.
The judge said Kim sought to evade responsibility for her crimes by returning some of the gifts once an investigation got under way or arguing she had purchased them herself.
“This shows that she was fully aware of the illegality of her actions but tried to conceal it,” he said.
Special counsel Min Joong-ki’s team, which had demanded a 7 1/2-year prison term, welcomed the ruling. Kim’s lawyers said they would appeal.
The court also sentenced the construction company chairman to a one-year prison term, suspended for two years, the businessperson who gifted the watch to a 10-month prison term, suspended for two years, and the pastor to a fine of 8 million won.
The former first lady has already been sentenced by an appeals court to four years in prison in a separate corruption case.
She is also set to stand trial over her alleged involvement in a case where members of the Unification Church were reportedly forced to join the now main opposition People Power Party ahead of the 2022 presidential election in an attempt to influence the outcome of the party primary to pick its presidential candidate, which her husband Yoon won.
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Members of Congress are again moving to block the U.S. Air Force from retiring all of its U-2S Dragon Lady spy planes. This time, legislators also want to compel the service to “fully restore” four of the iconic aircraft through heavy depot maintenance, which would bolster the fleet’s operational capacity. The Air Force continues to argue that the high-flying Cold War-era jets are too vulnerable to support future high-end fights and should be supplanted by a mix of space-based and other capabilities. This would presumably include a classified stealthy high-altitude drone, commonly (and unofficially) referred to as the RQ-180, or an evolution thereof, which first emerged publicly just earlier this year.
Yesterday, the House Appropriations Committee released a draft defense spending bill for the 2027 Fiscal Year. It includes a provision that would prevent the Air Force from retiring more than two U-2Ss in that fiscal cycle. The Air Force currently has 23 of these aircraft in inventory, including three two-seat TU-2S trainers.
One of the Air Force’s three TU-2S trainers. USAF
A summary of the proposed legislation also says it includes “$81 million for U-2 programmed depot maintenance to fully restore four aircraft.” The current operational status of the aircraft in question is unclear. This is included under the umbrella of $335.3 billion in total funding for operation and maintenance (O&M) accounts across the services that the draft bill would appropriate for Fiscal Year 2027.
Programmed depot maintenance for any aircraft is an intensive process that essentially involves a full tear-down and detailed inspection. Paint and other coatings are typically stripped and reapplied. Upgrades and modifications are often worked into depot maintenance cycles given the extensive work already being done.
“The Air Force will retire the entire 23-ship U-2 fleet, as the platform is no longer viable for future high-end conflicts,” the force structure report says. “Continued operation presents significant safety, logistical, and financial risks that outweigh the platform’s remaining utility in contested environments.”
“This decision allows for the strategic reallocation of fiscal resources to fund more critical, high-priority service requirements and accelerate modernization efforts in other key areas,” it adds. “Continuing to operate the U-2 fleet would require a significant investment to address systemic issues, including diminishing manufacturing capacity, material shortages, and safety risks inherent in the aging platform.”
A U-2 seen taking off from an undisclosed location in the Middle East in 2010. USAF
Questions about the continued relevance of the U-2 in the face of an ever-expanding global air defense threat ecosystem are not new. Near-peer competitors like China and Russia, as well as lower-tier potential adversaries like Iran, continue to develop and field more capable air defense systems and expand their anti-access and area denial bubbles. This, in turn, has threatened to push the U-2 further and further from the areas where it would be tasked to collect.
On top of all this, the U-2s are aging and becoming more costly to operate and maintain. The U-2S models in service today were upgraded from earlier variants that began their service careers in the 1980s.
The Dragon Lady continues to offer a unique ISR platform that can fly higher than any other operational non-orbital platform, crewed or uncrewed, the U.S. military has, at least from what we know today. This, in turn, means that the aircraft can bring imaging, signals intelligence, communications payloads, and other sensors up to those altitudes, giving them particularly good fields of view. From this perch, aircraft can use a slant angle to peer deep into denied areas while still flying international airspace and further away from potential threats. The use of the U-2 to gather intelligence about a Chinese spy balloon that soared over parts of the United States and Canada in 2023, which involved flying above it, offered a particularly public demonstration of the value of the aircraft’s high-altitude capabilities.
A view of the Chinese spy balloon soaring over the United States in 2023, as seen from the cockpit of a U-2. USAF
Each Dragon Lady can also carry a wide array of different sensor systems simultaneously, as well as communications packages, further increasing its flexibility. The U-2Ss have the ability to be readily deployed to forward locations globally and conduct long-duration sorties, as well. The latter points have been especially relevant in comparison to known existing ISR satellite constellations that are constrained by their orbits and can only offer relatively short-term coverage over a specific area. We will come back to this in a moment.
A now-dated graphic that still gives a good sense of the array of different sensors the U-2 can carry. US Military
The draft defense spending bill from the House Appropriations Committee does still have to be finalized, and then brought in line with companion legislation in the Senate. Both chambers of Congress then need to pass the bill before it can be sent to the President’s desk to be signed into law. There are many opportunities along the way for major changes to be made to the bill.
That being said, Congress has consistently blocked Air Force efforts to fully retire the U-2 in recent years. Another potential reprieve, which would also demand the service take steps to bolster the operational capacity of the remaining fleet, has now appeared on the horizon.
Jennie Bond was BBC Royal Correspondent for 14 years and struck up a friendship with Lady Diana.
20:34, 20 Jun 2026Updated 20:34, 20 Jun 2026
Jennie Bond spoke about her conversations with Princess Diana(Image: BBC)
Jennie Bond’s illustrious journalism career stretches back over five decades, during which she has covered a vast array of remarkable stories.
In 1989, she took on the role of Royal Correspondent for the BBC, a position she held for 14 years before stepping down in 2003 to dedicate more time to her family and pursue freelance work.
During her time as a royal reporter, however, she forged a close friendship with Lady Diana, which she discussed with Raj Bisram during her appearance on Celebrity Antiques Road Trip. A repeat of that episode aired this evening (June 20) on BBC Two.
The BBC antiques expert quizzed her on just how close their relationship was, to which she responded: “I was a journalist that she got along with and shared confidences with.
“You know, ‘There were three of us in this marriage,’ all this sort of stuff.”
“Then, at the end, annoyingly, she’d say, ‘Of course, Jennie, this is just between you and me and these four walls.’ I’d think, ‘Ugh!’ So I kept it that way.”
Raj then asked which interview throughout Jennie’s career had left the greatest impression on her, reports Devon Live.
She answered: “I suppose, when I challenged her in Angola on the land mine mission, when she was trying to get an international ban on land mines.
“I said, ‘Ma’am, you’ve been accused of being a loose cannon,’ and she was very shocked and said, ‘I’m just trying to be a humanitarian. That’s it.'”.
“That was pretty momentous. It made an awful lot of news.”
At the time, Lady Diana was described as a ‘loose cannon’ by a junior government Cabinet minister who condemned her position on landmines.
The tense exchange, which took place in 1997, was captured in a documentary of the time, showing Lady Diana’s response to Jennie’s pointed question.
She said: “I’m only trying to highlight a problem that’s going on all around the world. That’s all.”
She was subsequently filmed climbing into a waiting car, visibly moved by Jennie’s remark, as she told the camera team: “I might really burst into tears now. Who said I’m a loose cannon?”
Celebrity Antiques Road Trip is available to watch on BBC iPlayer.
