Valentin Pletzer shared a screen shot on Twitter of Google testing a top stories box, not the carousel, with image thumbnails. Normally only the top stories news carousel would have images and the top stories list view would not have images. Here is a screen shot Google testing showing images in the list view for top stories:
This is how it normally looks:
Here is what you can also see, a top stories list view without images along with a carousel with images:
Forum discussion at Twitter.
