NEW ORLEANS – President Bush for the first time took responsibility yesterday for federal government mistakes in dealing with Hurricane Katrina and suggested the calamity raised broader questions about the government’s ability to handle both natural disasters and terror attacks.

“Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government,” Mr. Bush said at a joint White House news conference with the Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani.

“And to the extent that the federal government didn’t fully do its job right, I take responsibility. I want to know what went right and what went wrong,” Mr. Bush said.

Facing sharp criticism and the lowest approval ratings of his presidency, Mr. Bush scheduled a speech to the nation from Louisiana for tomorrow night. It will be his fourth trip to the devastated Gulf Coast since the storm struck two weeks ago.

Meanwhile, the new acting director of FEMA, R. David Paulison, promised to get thousands of evacuees out of shelters and into temporary housing.

“We’re going to move on and get them the help they need,” Mr. Paulison said in his first public comments since he was named to replace Michael Brown, who resigned under fire over the government’s sluggish response to the disaster.

The updated Louisiana death toll, 423, came as Governor Blanco lashed out at the federal government, accusing it of moving too slowly in recovering the bodies. The dead “deserve more respect than they have received,” she said. “I am angry and outraged.”

But Ms. Blanco’s outburst created yet another case of bureaucratic fingerpointing. FEMA spokesman David Passey said he did not understand what the governor was talking about because, he said, the state asked to take over body recovery last week.

“The collection of bodies is not normally a FEMA responsibility,” Mr. Passey said.

In a day of reckoning across battered New Orleans, the owners of a nursing home were charged in the deaths of dozens of patients killed by Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters, the death toll in Louisiana jumped to 423, and the mayor warned that the city is broke, unable to make its next payroll.

Mayor C. Ray Nagin said the city was working “feverishly” with banking and federal officials to secure lines of credit through the end of the year.

Amid the discouraging news, there were also clear signs of progress on many fronts: The New Orleans airport reopened to commercial flights, the port resumed operations, and the mayor said dry sections of the ravaged city – including the French Quarter and the central business district – could be reopened during the daytime as early as Monday, provided the Environmental Protection Agency finds the air and water are safe.

“We’re out of nuclear-crisis mode and into normal, day-to-day crisis mode,” Mr. Nagin said.

The death toll climbed by more than half in a single day to 423, including last week’s grisly discovery of 34 dead patients and staff members at St. Rita’s nursing home in the town of Chalmette in hard-hit St. Bernard Parish.

The Louisiana attorney general, Charles Foti, charged the husband-and-wife owners of St. Rita’s with 34 counts of negligent homicide for not doing more to save their elderly patients. The case represents the first major prosecution to come out of the hurricane.

“The pathetic thing in this case was that they were asked if they wanted to move them and they did not,” Mr. Foti said. “They were warned repeatedly that this storm was coming. In effect, their inaction resulted in the deaths of these people.”

Salvador Mangano and his wife, Mable, surrendered and were jailed. Each count carries up to five years in prison.

The attorney general said he is also investigating the discovery of more than 40 corpses at flooded-out Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans. A hospital official said the 106-degree heat inside the hospital as the patients waited for days to be evacuated probably contributed to the deaths.

Even though both the airport and the waterfront were running at just a fraction of their capacity, the symbolic importance was not lost on a city that only days before had all but collapsed.

“From a commercial and psychological standpoint, this is five stars,” port president Gary LaGrange said between an outgoing barge shipment of auto parts to Alabama and the arrival of ships carrying coffee and wood from Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico.

Some experts had predicted it would take up to six months to get the port operating again after the hurricane damaged terminals and knocked out the electricity to operate cranes. A backlog of vessels had formed along the Mississippi River, waiting to load and unload cargo.