Four LA residents allegedly defrauded multiple insurance companies of over $141,000. A wildlife expert who reviewed footage of the incidents said that the culprit was "clearly a human in a bear suit."

The satirical news publication The Onion won the bidding for Alex Jones's Infowars at a bankruptcy auction, backed by families of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims whom Jones owes more than $1 billion US in defamation judgments for calling the massacre a hoax, the families announced Thursday.

Laguna 69 The stunning Laguna 69 in the Huascarán National Park near Hauraz Peru.

Social media platform Bluesky, a major competitor to Elon Musk’s X, has gained more than 1.25 million users since last week's U.S. presidential election. Bluesky posted Wednesday morning it had reached more than 15 million users, up from nine million in September.

The German Society for Nature Photography recently announced its winning images from the European Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2024, selected from nearly 18,000 entries from 38 countries in 11 categories. This year’s overall winner was Jaime Rojo, with a remarkable photograph of monarch butterflies clustered in trees in Mexico’s El Rosario Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary. Competition organizers were kind enough to share some of the winning and honored photographs with us here.

To receive an email notification every time new photo stories are published, sign up here.

President-elect Trump announced a "Department of Government Efficiency," or DOGE, that will be led by Tesla CEO Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, focused on shrinking the federal government.

(Image credit: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds and Alain Jocard)