It sounds like Laettner took out a $375,000 loan from a company based in Lexington, KY. Big mistake. Laettner missed the first payment, and now the company is taking Laettner to court to get its money back. Something tells me that Laettner isn’t going to get a lot of leeway in repaying his debts.

Google got a link up on the main page to donate money, which is good. They’re also matching employee donations like they did with the tsunami, so my wife and I will do that. Does anyone know of other solid charities or service organizations in addition to the Red Cross? If you have suggestions, leave them in the comments. I’d also want to hear any ways that Google could help with disasters like this in the future.

By the way, props to Amazon for providing an easy, rock-solid donate link at http://www.amazon.com/gp/philanthropy/red-cross.html.

Update: Jensense tells how to run Red Cross donation ads as your AdSense alternate ad.

Update: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=new+orleans&t=e has Katrina images in Google Maps. The data is available in the API too for anyone that’s making a relief site. There’s a new entry on the Google Blog with more details. Also, Google Earth allows regular people to add data to Google Earth. Several NASA/CMU/Google people have been placing NOAA data into Google Earth via KML (Keyhole Markup Language) files. More info here: http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/95816/an/currentEvents/page/0#95816. Thank you to all the people who worked hard to get this data live.