Fox News' Maria Bartiromo served up a new conspiracy theory to the network's viewers, suggesting the US was "drumming up" news of internal strife in Russia to distract from Hunter Biden news. During Fox & Friends on Sunday, Bartiromo complained about a "double standard" she sees when it comes to Hunter Biden, and insisted that the biggest story of the weekend was not the dramatic break between the Wagner Group mercenaries and their Russian benefactors, but rather the president's son. “I know that the State Department and the White House would like everybody to move the Hunter Biden story off of the front page and start talking about all the drama in Russia over the weekend,” Bartiromo said. “We’re not going to do that on Sunday Morning Futures. The biggest story of the week was that WhatsApp message from Hunter Biden, and he is basically doing a shakedown that you would expect in a Francis Ford Coppola Godfather movie.” The "story of the week" Ms Bartiromo was referring to was a WhatsApp message in which Hunter Biden dropped his father's name to pressure a Chinese business associate to pay him. The message was reported after Hunter Biden accepted a plea deal from federal prosecutors over a misdemeanour tax charge and a felony gun charges. Bartiromo suggested the news out of Russia that the notorious Wagner Group, a mercenary organisation the carries out military operations for Russia, was revolting against its benefactors was a distraction handed to the media from Joe Biden. “The White House wanted to give the media something else to cover, and this is the MO. This is exactly the way they do things,” she said. She claims she predicted that the White House would try to cover up the WhatsApp message with a different story. "On Friday I said ‘Wow, what a blockbuster WhatsApp message. I’m sure there will be an enormous story over the weekend that the White House is gonna be pushing to take this story off the front page.’ And sure enough, we’ve got the State Department drumming up the drama that took place over the weekend in Russia," she said. "So I don’t know if it’s going to break through. The mainstream media has an excuse again not to cover it. They’re covering everything about Russia and the Wagner Group as if it really matters to the US right now." But even Bartiromo's network was covering the dramatic in-fighting in Russia, albeit with its own tinge of conspiracy theory. The day before, a Fox & Friends co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy claimed that the US might be pulling the strings behind the Wagner Group's short-lived uprising. Despite her insistence that the Wagner Group's actions would be of little import to Americans, she led her Sunday Morning Futures show with an interview featuring Congressman Michael McCaul about the mercenary outfit. Read More Fox News choose Jesse Watters to replace Tucker Carlson in primetime shakeup Trump hits out at Fox News’s Bret Baier after incriminating interview: ‘It was nasty, unfriendly, no smiling’ Trump fumes about ‘illegally leaked’ CNN tape of him boasting about classified documents The Body in the Woods | An Independent TV Original Documentary The harrowing discovery at centre of The Independent’s new documentary

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Taylor Swift has reportedly expressed her gratitude to the truck drivers working on her Eras Tour by giving each of them a $100,000 bonus. The 33-year-old singer is currently on her record-breaking tour which has earned an estimated $300 million in gross revenue, as per Pollstar. Last year, Billboard estimated that Swift's tour would gross $590 million over the course of 52 tour dates. With this huge financial success, Swift has used the fortune to reward her truckers who are responsible for transporting her equipment and staging around the country. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Each of the 50 truck drivers were given $100,000 each ahead of Swift's show in Santa Clara on Saturday, which adds up to $5 million in total for the "end-of-the-tour" bonuses, both TMZ and Entertainment Tonight reported. Plus, bonuses were also handed out to other people on her tour crew such as her band members, dancers, lighting and sound technicians, caterers and others. Though the amount paid to the other members remains unclear, TMZ reported that it was a "very generous amount." Altogether it is thought that The Eras tour could be the highest-grossing tour of all time, earning a massive $1 billion in sales. It's been a record-breaking year for Swift who also became the first woman to have four albums in the top 10 of the Billboard charts. She also became the first female artist in history to surpass 93 million monthly listeners on Spotify. Elsewhere, tickets for Swift's Eras Tour LA shows are on sale for $11,000, while the singer also sparked a meme frenzy with an August post. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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