JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South Africans adopted a mood of sombre resignation on Monday to the inevitability of saying goodbye to former president Nelson Mandela after the 94-year-old anti-apartheid leader's condition in hospital deteriorated to critical.

Madiba, as he is affectionately known, is revered among most of South Africa's 53 million people as the architect of the 1994 transition to multi-racial democracy after three centuries of white domination.

However, his latest hospitalization - his fourth in six months - has reinforced a realization that the father of the post-apartheid "Rainbow Nation" will not be around for ever.

President Jacob Zuma, who visited Mandela late on Sunday with African National Congress (ANC) Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, reflected the national mood when he told a news conference that Mandela remained critical.

"All of us in the country must accept that Madiba is now old. As he ages, his health will trouble him," Zuma said, declining to give specific details about Mandela's medical condition or other information from his hospital visit.

"Given the hour, he was already asleep. We saw him, looked at him and then we had a bit of a discussion with the doctors and his wife," Zuma said. "I don't think I'm a position to give further details. I'm not a doctor."

U.S. President Barack Obama is due to visit South Africa this week as part of a three-country Africa tour but Zuma said Mandela's worsening state of health should not affect the trip.

"Nothing is going to stop the visit because Madiba is sick," Zuma said.

Mandela's daughter Makaziwe said the family was taking each day as it came and enjoying as much time as possible with a man who, to them, is simply a father, grandfather or great-grandfather.

"He is at peace with himself," she told CNN. "He has given so much to the world. I believe he is at peace."

"WE WILL MISS HIM"

Mandela's deterioration this weekend, two weeks after being admitted in a serious but stable condition with a lung infection, has caused a perceptible switch in mood from prayers for recovery to preparations for a fond farewell.

"If it's his time to go, he can go. I wish God can look after him," said nurse Petunia Mafuyeka, as she headed to work in Johannesburg.

"We will miss him very much. He fought for us to give us freedom. We will remember him every day. When he goes I will cry."

There was some concern among the public about doctors trying to prolong the life of South Africa's first black president, one of the 20th Century's most influential figures.

"I'm worried that they're keeping him alive. I feel they should let him go," said Doris Lekalakala, a claims manager. "The man is old. Let nature take its course. He must just rest."

Since stepping down in 1999 after one term as president, Mandela has stayed out of active politics in a country with the continent's biggest and most important economy. His passing is expected to have little political impact.

His last public appearance was waving to fans from the back of a golf cart before the final of the soccer World Cup in Johannesburg's Soccer City stadium in July 2010.

During his retirement, he has divided his time between his home in the wealthy Johannesburg suburb of Houghton, and Qunu, the village in the poor Eastern Cape province where he was born.

The public's last glimpse of him was a brief clip aired by state television in April during a visit to his home by Zuma and other senior ANC officials.

At the time, the 101-year-old liberation movement, which led the fight against white-minority rule, assured the public Mandela was "in good shape", although the footage showed a thin and frail old man sitting expressionless in an armchair.

(Additional reporting by Pascal Fletcher; Writing by Ed Cropley; Editing by Pascal Fletcher and Alison Williams)

It's no accident he's leaving a school that regularly plays for national titles at the NCAA's highest level to one that competes at its lowest.

Thorp's done with big-time college sports, and if he had his way, other school presidents would be finished with them, too. Many leaders just don't have the training to handle a major athletics program, he argues.

It's a message that may resonate with administrators at institutions that have lately felt the sting of scandals tied to athletics.

"I feel great compassion for my colleagues that are getting caught up in this," Thorp said. "My main concern in this, and the reason I've been saying what I've been saying, is I'm worried about the people who are my friends. But I'm also worried about the institutions that are having their leadership diverted in this way."

Thorp will resign from his alma mater with its 18,000 undergraduates at the end of June to work at Washington (about 6,000 undergrads) after spending most of the past three years dealing with a withering array of NCAA and athletics-related problems. They dominated his time, despite the fact that at least when he took the job he was a novice in the business of athletics.

He's come to the conclusion that presidents should step aside and let their athletic directors handle the job.

"Either we put the ADs back in charge and hold them accountable if things don't work," Thorp said in April during a campus forum, "... or let's be honest and tell everyone when we select (presidents) to run institutions that run big-time sports that athletics is the most important part of their job."

Sports have certainly created enormous problems for several top college administrators.

Ohio State University president Gordon Gee announced he was retiring Tuesday, after The Associated Press last week published remarks he made mocking Notre Dame, Roman Catholics and the Southeastern Conference during an athletic council meeting in December. Previously, during a 2011 scandal, Gee joked he was worried then-football coach Jim Tressel, who admitted to breaking NCAA rules, would dismiss him.

Rutgers University president Robert Barchi and the school have faced fierce criticism over the hiring of incoming athletic director Julie Hermann, who was accused of being verbally and emotionally abusive by players on the Tennessee volleyball team she coached in the 1990s. That came after the school fired men's basketball coach Mike Rice for throwing balls at his players and berating them in practice. In the aftermath of Rice's ouster, former athletic director Tim Pernetti also resigned.

At the University of Miami, president Donna Shalala has spent nearly two years dealing with an NCAA investigation of allegations that booster Nevin Shapiro provided thousands of dollars in improper benefits to Hurricanes athletes. She's publicly criticized the NCAA's probe, saying the school had been "wronged" and that the programs have "suffered enough" through self-imposed sanctions.

And, at Penn State University, former president Graham Spanier faces charges of perjury and concealing child sex abuse allegations involving former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky in a scandal that ended the long tenure of Joe Paterno and led to unprecedented sanctions from the NCAA.

Murray Sperber, a critic of commercialization in college sports, wonders why presidents don't stumble more often when it comes to overseeing a realm that is often foreign to them. Most come from the academic side and make their way through the administrative ranks that exist as separate worlds from athletics on a college campus, he said.

"If you put me in charge of the Atomic Energy Commission, I would get in trouble," said Sperber, an author and a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley's graduate school of education. "I wouldn't know what to say. It's so inevitable that I'm kind of amazed nobody just stands up and says, 'Look, these presidents don't know anything.'"

The idea of presidential control in athletics took hold with the recommendations of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics in the early 1990s.

The commission was created by the Knight Foundation in 1989, after a string of college sports scandals created a sense that athletic departments had gotten out of control and threatened schools' academic integrity. The commission noted in one report that 57 of the 106 schools then competing at the highest level of sports had been penalized by the NCAA in the 1980s, along with reports of athletes taking courses like "recreational leisure."

Putting the school president at the center of reform efforts was a key part of what the commission advocated.

"The Knight Commission's message remains that presidential responsibility for all elements of university life doesn't stop at the entry of its stadiums, arenas and playing fields." Amy Perko, the current executive director of the Knight Commission said in a statement Tuesday.

"As long as college sports are part of the academic enterprise, it's the president's job to ensure that its sports programs reflect the university values."

While Perko said presidents don't need to manage the daily operations of an athletic department, she said more must be done "to better educate governing boards and new and aspiring presidents about their roles and responsibilities for athletics oversight."

Welch Suggs Jr., a former associate director for the Knight Commission, said the problem is more about determining the role of college athletics than a question of whether the presidential-control model is flawed.

"If it's to be a big-time American spectacle, like the NFL or Major League Baseball, then no way," said Suggs, now an associate professor of journalism at the University of Georgia. "It makes absolutely no sense for academic leaders to be in charge of it. But if you want it to be a part of higher education and a function of the collegiate experience, someone has to make sure people in athletics know they're part of the educational process and not just a commercial business."

Thorp certainly understands the difficulty finding that balance.

In his first two years, he thought athletics "was the least of my worries" after the Tar Heels men's basketball, women's soccer and field hockey teams each won national championships.

Everything changed when the NCAA launched an investigation into improper benefits in the football program in the 2010. That soon expanded to academic misconduct involving a university tutor, then got worse with findings of fraud and no-show classes in an academic department with significant athlete enrollments.

At the height of the scrutiny, Thorp said the problems regularly dominated his time and diverted his focus from running the school.

And, now, after he's probably had enough experience to handle college sports and all its problems, he's eager for to step away from it.

As for the Knight Commission, Thorp said the two sides will agree to disagree.

"We don't have a commission that tells us not to trust the dean of medicine to run the hospital, but we do have a commission that tells us not to trust the ADs to run athletics," he said. "It doesn't make any sense."

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AP National Writer Nancy Armour in Chicago contributed to this report.

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - So who's going to win this weekend's box office showdown between openers "White House Down," with Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx, and "The Heat," with Melissa McCarthy and Sandra Bullock?

Would you believe "Monsters University," with Mike and Sully?

Disney-Pixar's 3D animated family film is a good bet to top them both and repeat as box office champ, bringing in around $40 million, the analysts say. That would be a roughly 50 percent drop from its $82 million opening, and would be an accomplishment given the competition.

Both Sony's action epic and Fox's female cop comedy are projected to come in at around $35 million, and Paramount's zombie thriller "World War Z" will likely have a second weekend just under that. Those movies and Warner Bros.' Superman offering "Man of Steel" will compete for the same audiences, while Monsters U" will have the family field to itself, and that's what gives it the edge.

Both of the openers will debut in more than 3,000 theaters, and both are buddy films, at least to a degree.

Tatum and Foxx play a cop and the President, respectively, teaming up to fight a terrorist attack in "White House," while McCarthy and Bullock are reluctant and mismatched cop partners in pursuit of a drug lord, in "The Heat."

Both have directors with significant followings and both have the potential to break out.

"The Heat" is directed by Paul Feig of "Bridesmaids," and reviews indicate it has earned its R rating with loads of the raunchy humor that made his 2011 comedy a hit. "Bridesmaids," which also featured McCarthy, took in more than $170 million at the domestic box office.

"The Heat" is at 86 percent positive on review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes.

"The Heat" is also the summer's first - and only - major movie with two female leads. McCarthy in particular is red-hot. Her January release "Identity Thief" is still the year's highest-grossing comedy with $135 million domestically, and many critics saw her supporting turn as the best part of "The Hangover Part 3."

Online ticket broker Fandango reported Thursday that sales for "The Heat" were pacing more than 50 percent ahead of sales for "Bridesmaids" and "Identity Thief."

Roland Emmerich, who blows things up with the best of them, is the director of the PG-13-rated "White House Down." He has a track record of opening action epics big, from 2009's "2012" ($65 million) and 2004's "The Day After Tomorrow" ($68 million) to 1996's "Independence Day" ($50 million). But he's had his misses as well, including 2011's "Anonymous."

An X factor for "White House Down" is the impact of "Olympus Has Fallen," a similarly themed president-in-peril movie that has taken in nearly $100 million since March for FilmDistrict. The Facebook numbers are encouraging for Sony; "White House Down" had nearly 294,000 "likes" three days prior to its release, as compared to the 159,000 that "Olympus Has Fallen" had.

The critics aren't impressed - it's a 44 percent positive on Rotten Tomatoes - but that's never been a big factor with Emmerich movies.

On the specialty front, IFC Films is opening "Byzantium," a creepy thriller directed by Neil Jordan (TVs "The Borgias"), in six theaters across the country. Saoirse Ronan and Gemma Arterton star in the tale of two mysterious women who seek shelter at a small-town resort.

Writer-director Pedro Almodovar's R-rated comedy "I'm So Excited" will make its limited debut for Sony Classics. The Spanish import takes place almost entirely on an airplane, and stars Javier Camara, Cecilia Roth, Lola Duenas and Raul Arevalo. Antonio Banderas, Penelope Cruz and Paz Vega make cameo appearances.

Tribeca Films is opening Adrian Grenier's documentary "How to Make Money Selling Drugs" in five cities this weekend. It debuted earlier this month on iTunes and Demand, and on Wednesday at the IFC Center in New York.

Written and directed by Grenier's longtime collaborator and friend Matthew Cooke, the documentary is an insider's look at the drug industry, told from the perspective of former drug dealers. It features interviews with rappers 50 Cent, Rick Ross and Russell Simmons, as well as rights advocates and filmmakers Susan Sarandon and Woody Harrelson.

Obama's senior energy and climate adviser, Heather Zichal, said the plan would boost energy efficiency of appliances and buildings, plus expand renewable energy. She also said the Environmental Protection Agency was preparing to use its authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate heat-trapping pollution from coal-fired power plants.

"The EPA has been working very hard on rules that focus specifically on greenhouse gases from the coal sector," Zichal said.

Zichal, speaking at a forum hosted by The New Republic in Washington, said that none of the proposals would require new funding or action from Congress. It has shown no appetite for legislation that would put a price on carbon dioxide after a White House-backed bill to set up a market-based system died in Obama's first term with Democrats in charge.

The plan, with details expected to be made public in coming weeks, comes as Obama has been under increasing pressure from environmental groups and lawmakers from states harmed by Superstorm Sandy to cut pollution from existing power plants, the largest source of climate-altering gases. Several major environmental groups and states have threatened to sue the administration to force cuts to power plant emissions. And just last week, former Vice President Al Gore, a prominent climate activist and fellow Democrat, pointedly called on Obama to go beyond "great words" to "great actions."

It was unclear whether the White House's plans would include controls on existing power plants. An administration official, who wasn't authorized to comment on the plan by name, said the White House was still weighing it. But since the administration has already proposed action on future power plants, the law would likely compel it to eventually tackle the remaining plants, or it would be forced to through litigation.

Obama's remarks in Berlin echoed comments he made in his State of the Union and inaugural speeches this year.

"This is the global threat of our time," Obama said Wednesday. "And for the sake of future generations, our generation must move toward a global compact to confront a changing climate before it is too late. That is our job. That is our task. We have to get to work."

Some environmentalists who cheered those remarks when they were made months ago, criticized them Wednesday.

"President Obama deserves praise for including climate change among the long-term threats facing us all," said Ned Helme, president of the Center for Clear Air Policy, an environmentally friendly think tank. "But he should do more than talk about the problem. The president needs to put the full force of his office behind new regulations that will truly curb greenhouse gas emissions. For too long now, he has produced little action. I'm encouraged that he will finally act and not just ask."

Meanwhile, the environmental community is growing impatient.

"I really can't understand why they haven't moved forward on this more quickly, and we hope that turns around," said Nathan Wilcox of Environment America.

An orchestrated and well-publicized campaign to persuade Obama to reject the Keystone XL oil pipeline, which would carry oil extracted from tar sands in western Canada to refineries along the Texas Gulf Coast, appears to be an uphill battle.

Opponents call the $7 billion project a "carbon bomb" that would carry "dirty oil" and exacerbate global warming. But the State Department in an environmental evaluation concluded that other means of transporting the oil would be worse from a climate perspective.

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Associated Press writer Matthew Daly contributed to this report.

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Follow Dina Cappiello on Twitter at www.twitter.com/dinacappiello and Josh Lederman at www.twitter.com/joshledermanAP