I'm suspicious. This recent item from engadget is setting all kinds of tongues wagging. I on the other hand hear, 'Danger, Danger Will Robinson!'.

News organizations in other countries are starting to quote the story which engadget has sourced from only one spot; forums.somethingawful.com.

Couple the single, unreliable source with the fact that the EXIF tags for "Date Time Original" and "Date Time Digitized" are from January 7, 2004 and I think we have a problem here...

Where is Lenovo's press release? What about an LAX release? Why no local stories in TV or the newspapers?

UPDATE: Well duh... somethingawful.com specializes in hoaxes.

UPDATE 2 (Sept. 21): This is just getting weirder. Tom Krazit of cnet.com assures me that Lenovo has told him that "there was an fire incident at LAX and that their laptop was involved". Brian Humphrey (Firefighter/Specialist, Public Service Officer, Los Angeles Fire Department) at first reported no fire calls but subsequently discovered that(check out the comments):
"One media caller today provided more detail in the way of a date and approximate time, and I discovered our response on Friday, September 15, 2006 at 5:44 PM to Terminal 7 at LAX.
We responded to a 'fire out' in the terminal area involving a personal laptop computer. The apparent fire had been completely extinguished with a dry chemical extinguisher by bystanders prior to our arrival.
There were no injuries.
The LAFD notified custodial staff at LAX to handled the cleanup. Firefighters did not determine the make and model of the device or the cause of the fire."

The original source and the photo anomalies are still very problematic. On top of that, there are not yet any reported corroborating eye-witness accounts from people who are not using pseudonyms. Stay tuned.

UPDATE 3 (Sept. 29, 2006): Lenovo announces a re-call on some R, T and X series notebooks. There are still big questions to be answered about how this story originally broke and got reported but, sadly, I don't think we're going to get the answers. The truth is out there...