It’s been hard to concentrate on my day job, writing about financial services in the U.S., with all the heartbreaking news from New Orleans pouring out. Ian, who called NOLA home for 3 years in the mid '90s, has been on our Vonage phone with friends who fled the flooded city. One moved to NOLA for a job just three weeks before Katrina hit and hadn’t yet received his first paycheck. He called from Mississippi on his way back to his childhood home of New York. Another, who runs the New Orleans Film Festival held each October, has already found a temporary job at a museum in Tampa, Florida. No word on her long-time home in Mid-City or the prospects for the festival. Another friend is in North Carolina. We think another, whose apartment was in the lower Ninth Ward (Bywater), is in Los Angeles. We heard of one who stayed after most evacuated: A friend’s sister who is a nurse at Charity was manually ventilating patients who couldn’t breathe on their own.