Berlin-Novak Djokovic, Serena Williams and All Blacks honoured at Laureus World Sports Awards in Berlin

• Novak Djokovic and Serena Williams claimed Laureus Sportsman and Sportswoman of the Year awards 
• World No 1s Djokovic and Williams each won three of the four grand slams last year 
• Jordan Spieth won the Breakthrough of the Year award after his 2015 Masters and US Open triumphs 
• Steve Hansen's All Blacks won Team of the Year award following their World Cup victory last year 
• Holland legend Johan Cruyff, who passed away in March, was honoured during the ceremony 

Novak Djokovic and Serena Williams completed a clean sweep for tennis as they won the Laureus Sportsman and Sportswoman of the Year awards on Monday.

In a glitzy ceremony in the German capital, hosted by actor Bill Murray, Djokovic beat Barcelona footballer Lionel Messi, sprinter Usain Bolt and Formula One champion Lewis Hamilton among others for the top men's award at the annual ceremony.

Djokovic and Williams, who fought off competition from footballer Carli Lloyd and Jamaican sprinter Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce among others, were rewarded for dominating their sport last year, with each winning three of the four grand slams. 

In his acceptance speech, Djokovic dedicated the award to the Dutch legend Johan Cruyff, who passed away in March, and the former Formula One driver Niki Lauda, who were also both honored during the ceremony.

Lauda received a lifetime achievement award and Cruyff was honored for his charity work. His son Jordi accepted the award.

Novak Djokovic makes a speech after the World No 1 received the Laureus Sportsman of the Year awards in Berlin 

Djokovic was rewarded for dominating his sport last year, with the Serb star winning three of the four tennis grand slams 

Djokovic beat Barcelona star Lionel Messi, sprinter Usain Bolt and F1 champion Lewis Hamilton among others for the top men's award

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(From L-R) All Blacks coach Steve Hansen, former captain Richie McCaw and ex-All Black Sean Fitzpatrick hold the Team of the Year gong

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Former All Blacks flanker McCaw, who lead his country to back-to-back World Cups in 2011 and 2015, accepts the award on stage 

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Former Formula One driver Niki Lauda (right) received a lifetime achievement award during the ceremony 

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Former Barca defender Carles Puyol hands the Laureus Spirit of Sport Award to Jordi Cruyff on behalf of his late father Johan Cruyff 

Jordan Spieth delivers a video message afer wiinning the Breakthrough of the Year award for his 2015 Masters and US Open victories 

LAUREUS WINNERS LIST

Laureus World Sportsman of the Year: Novak Djokovic 

Laureus World Sportswoman of the Year: Serena Williams 

Laureus World Team of the Year: All Blacks 

Laureus World Breakthrough of the Year: Jordan Spieth 

Laureus World Comeback of the Year: Dan Carter 

Laureus World Sportsperson of the Year with a Disability: Daniel Dias 

Laureus World Action Sportsperson of the Year: Jan Frodeno 

'He had a great year again,' said Boris Becker, who is Djokovic's coach. 

'He's played 88 matches, has won 82, He won three out of the four Grand Slams, reached the final of the French Open, he's won seven other tournaments. Very few players, if any, had a year like that.' 

Both athletes picked up the top prize for the third time, with Williams having previously won it in 2003 and 2010 while Djokovic was also victorious in 2012 and 2015.

Golfer Jordan Spieth won the Breakthrough of the Year award after capturing his first two majors at the 2015 Masters and US Open. 

Spieth said: 'Thank you so much to the Laureus Academy. Just to know a couple of you is an honour. For me it's unique. We're used to being recognised in the golfing community but this Award recognises us around the world to all of sport and it's something that's very difficult to put into words.' 

Steve Hansen's all-conquering All Blacks won Team of the Year award following their World Cup victory on English soil last year. 

New Zealand fly-half Dan Carter received the Laureus Comeback of the Year Award after his superb displays during the tournament. 

'It's nice to be recognised for the year I had in 2015,' said the veteran No 10. 

'It was a very special year, not only for me, but also for the All Blacks and to be a part of that was amazing.' 

There was some joy for the host nation as well with triathlete Jan Frodeno grabbing the Action Sportsperson of the Year prize. 

British racing star Hamilton, who is currently 36 points points behind Mercedes team-mate Nico Rosberg, was in attendance 

Former Juventus and Italy forward Alessandro Del Piero holds his award following the ceremony in the German capital 

Germany football manager Joachim Low, who is preparing his side for Euro 2016 this summer, addresses the audience

Paul-Krugman Over the Edge: He Should Apologize for Smearing Bernie Sanders With False Charges

BRIAN SNYDER / REUTERS

Paul Krugman has been waging a one-man war against Bernie Sanders, lobbing bombs and missiles from his perch at the New York Times, in column after blog post after column. It is interesting that has chosen to repeatedly smear Bernie, ad nauseum, rather than try to promote some positive qualities about Hillary Clinton or her record, about which he has said very little. Perhaps it is because for Krugman, who is neither a moderate Republican nor a conservative Democrat, nor a neoconservative militarist on foreign policy, it’s not so easy for him to promote Hillary.

But on Friday he really went “over the edge,” to use his own words. And this time, he really owes Bernie and his millions of voters and supporters an apology.

In his column, he argues that Bernie does not consider African-Americans to be “real Democrats,” which implies that Bernie is a racist. What is the evidence that he offers for such a serious charge?

Just these two sentences in his column:

Over the past week, Mr. Sanders has declared that Mrs. Clinton leads only because she has won in the “Deep South,” which is a “pretty conservative part of the country.” The tally so far, he says, “distorts reality” because it contains so many Southern states.

Let’s ignore that he exaggerates what Bernie actually said. For Krugman, because Hillary “won big in the South” by “getting an overwhelming majority of Black voters,” this means that Bernie’s brief statements are an “effort to delegitimize” these voters, saying they are not “real Democrats” and “shouldn’t count.”

But this is nonsense. There is an obvious way to understand Bernie’s statement that is consistent with what any historian or political scientist can tell you. The white voters who would vote for a progressive, populist candidate like Sanders are lacking in the Democratic primaries in Southern states. This is a reasonable observation and does not imply in any way that African-American voters are not “real Democrats.”

Of course, these states are conservative, by most measures — no secret there. Now, white people are still the majority of the country, including in the South, and some white people are not conservative — 40 percent of white voters voted for President Obama in 2012.

Other white voters, including some non-rich and working-class whites, may have a mix of inconsistent views but will vote for someone like Bernie in a Democratic primary, because they can see he is more likely to defend their interests than Hillary on a whole set of issues: against commercial agreements like NAFTA or the TPP that push down wages and export good-paying jobs; against the corruption of our political system and the destructive influence of Wall Street banks; against the massive redistribution of income that has made the United States a vastly more unequal society than it was 30 years ago. On these and other issues, Bernie and Hillary have very, very different track records.

And Hillary has taken tens of millions of dollars from corporations that are on the other side of the issues that these white voters care about. Perhaps that is why 84 percent of Democratic voters, in a recent poll consider Bernie to be “honest and trustworthy,” a 28 point lead over Hillary.

It is outrageous for Krugman to smear Bernie Sanders in this way, on the basis of Krugman’s own personal, and not very believable, interpretation of a couple of sentences stated by the candidate. Bernie has been fighting for civil rights and against racism since the 1960s, including his arrest for protesting racial discrimination in housing at the University of Chicago in 1963.

Krugman has repeatedly attacked Sanders for rude comments or emails he has received from people that he describes with the media-invented pejorative “Bernie bros.” If some random pro-Hillary internet trolls criticize me for this piece, rest assured that I will not try to attribute blame to Hillary Clinton, or to her campaign.

It’s not surprising that Krugman has to go to such great lengths to discredit Bernie. Someone who has been in politics for 40 years and has no dirt on him; who is not getting a dollar from corporations or Super-PACS, but is funding his campaign with a record 6 million contributions averaging 27 dollars each; who has been fighting consistently for the same progressive goals throughout his political career — this is a rare politician indeed, and not so easy to tarnish.

But really, Krugman should apologize this time. He has gone too far.

The Fix, Hillary Clinton is totally beatable in a general election. Just not by Donald Trump or Ted Cruz.

Hillary Clinton 

Take two minutes to flip through the new NBC-Wall Street Journal poll and you are left with two very clear takeaways:

1. Hillary Clinton is deeply vulnerable in a general election.

2. Donald Trump and, to a lesser extent, Ted Cruz, are the exact wrong candidates to take advantage of Clinton's weaknesses.

That is the reality that faces Republicans as they look down the road at the general election.  A totally winnable race after eight years out of the White House that may be unwinnable -- or close to it -- because of a primary process that has put forward two of their least appealing general election candidates.

Start with this: Just one in three (32 percent) of general election voters see Clinton in a positive light while 56 percent regard her negatively.  That's Clinton's worst score since NBC-WSJ started asking about Clinton's image in early 2001.

And, the NBC-WSJ numbers are far from an outlier. Her numbers -- particularly when it comes to the number of people who view her as "honest" and "trustworthy" have long been in net negative territory -- and the ongoing questions surrounding her private email server while serving as Secretary of State doesn't help matters.  The simple fact is that Clinton is totally known by the general electorate and somewhere between mildly and strongly disliked by a majority of them.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton responded to criticism from rival contenders on various Sunday shows. (TWP)

That's a problem.  In a "normal" election year it's a really BIG problem.

This is not a normal election year, which of course you know unless you've been hiding under a pile of coats for the last 15 months.  So, yes, Clinton is unpopular. But her numbers look positively great when compared to where Donald Trump stands in that same NBC-WSJ poll.

Just one in four (24 percent) of respondents give Trump a positive rating while 65 percent give him a negative one. That's a "historic low for a major presidential candidate in the NBC/WSJ poll," according to NBC deputy political director Carrie Dann.

But, when you look inside those Trump numbers, things get even worse. 

Seven in ten women view Trump negatively! Three in four millennials! Eight in ten Hispanics!

Those numbers are historically bad. And, I would say that no candidate could win a general election with them except that I have witnessed Trump flip his negatives to positives with Republican voters so I am not ready to rule it totally out. What I will say is those numbers make it virtually impossible for a candidate to win a general election.

Cruz is not Trump. But, neither is he popular with the broader electorate. Twenty six percent of people had a positive view of him as compared to 49 percent who had a negative view. That's a net -23, right in line with Clinton's net -24. And, it's worth considering that Cruz is less well known than either Clinton or Trump, meaning that he has room to grow -- either positively or negatively -- if and when he becomes the GOP nominee. My guess is that Cruz's Senate record would provide Democratic groups as well as Clinton's campaign with ample opposition research to cast the Texan as too conservative for the average swing voter in, say, Ohio.

The old adage that you can't beat someone with no one fits here. Put slightly more accurately, it's that you can't beat an unpopular person with someone even less popular.

If Clinton and Trump are the two presidential nominees, which still seems the most likely outcome today, you can expect a race-to-the-bottom the likes of which have been rarely seen even in presidential politics. Given where each of the candidate's numbers stand, the only way to win will be to make it a choice between bad and worse.

Clinton seems poised to win that fight -- by a wide margin against Trump and a narrower margin against Cruz.  Should Clinton be elected the 45th president of the United States, Republicans will spend the next four years (at least) kicking themselves at missing such a great opportunity. But, as it stands today, that is exactly what they are poised to do.

Chris Cillizza writes “The Fix,” a politics blog for the Washington Post. He also covers the White House.

NY-Bernie Sanders’ illiberal supporters: Do they expect safe spaces everywhere?

Bernie Sanders Interview with New York Daily News Editorial Board (Full Audio)

NY Daily News

As Bernie Sanders continues to challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, the time has come to focus some of those who are most actively backing his candidacy.

Most of those voting for Sanders are decent people who truly deserve to be called “progressives.” But among his most active supporters are hard left elements within organizations such as Black Lives Matter, CodePink and MoveOn who are more appropriately called repressives. Too many of them have too little tolerance for views different than their own.

TRANSCRIPT: BERNIE SANDERS MEETS WITH THE DAILY NEWS EDITORIAL BOARD

Traditional liberals who have made their home in the Democratic Party should be wary of these groups. Much like the Sanders campaign, many of them are dominated by Occupy Wall Street veterans, whose brand of unfocused revolutionary politics was widely derided by Democrats and Republicans alike in 2011. They are at war with certain core liberal values, particularly as regards free speech.

Several weeks ago, for example, dozens of Black Lives Matter activists infiltrated a Donald Trump rally and forced the organizers to cancel due to security concerns, after they became involved in heated confrontations with Trump’s supporters. Whatever one may think of Trump’s policies, there is no excuse for preventing the candidate from expressing them at a political rally. They abridged both Trump’s right to free expression and the ability of thousands of their fellow citizens to participate in the political process.

MoveOn thanked the disruptors for their actions.

JONATHAN DRAKE/REUTERS

Shouting down Donald

Nor have such repressive actions been confined to Trump rallies: Clinton events have been regularly targeted as well, most recently in Philadelphia, where Black Lives Matter activists engaged in a lengthy confrontation with former President Bill Clinton, repeatedly shouting over his attempts to engage them in substantive discussion.

TRANSCRIPT: HILLARY CLINTON MEETS WITH THE DAILY NEWS EDITORIAL BOARD

These tactics have been on clearest display in the context of the debate surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In January, for example, far-left activists organized by BLM shut down an LGBTQ conference in Chicago by storming the event, and denying the speakers the opportunity to address the crowd, by chanting “occupy, occupy” and “no justice, no peace.” While protests are a legitimate part of the political process, disruptive efforts to shut down speakers are not.

Disruptive tactics have gone hand in hand with other initiatives designed to silence pro-Israel voices. CodePink, many of the leaders of Black Lives Matter, and a host of other organizations have endorsed or cooperated with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Among other measures, BDS calls for the boycott of Israeli cultural and academic institutions, as well as for “common sense” boycotts of individuals and organizations that are too supportive of Israel.

GONZALEZ: WHEN VOTING CLINTON OR SANDERS, ACTIONS MATTER, NOT WORDS

New York Daily News front pages on the presidential election

Sanders himself has contributed to anti-Israel defamation: In his interview with the editorial board of the New York Daily News, he suggested that 10,000 civilians had been killed in Gaza by Israel during Operation Protective Edge. The truth is that somewhere between 600 and 1,500 civilians — many of whom were used as human shields by Hamas — were killed in a legitimate military effort to protect Israeli civilians, despite Israeli efforts to minimize civilian casualties. Such woeful misrepresentations serve to justify and encourage the repressive bigotry that has become the staple of anti-Israel, left-wing activists.

On university campuses, repressives have justified silencing dissent using “safe space” language, arguing that students should not be exposed to ideas or historical facts that they find threatening. This demonstrates a profoundly warped conception of free speech that seems to reflect the maxim “free speech for me, but not for thee.”

We know that these repressives support Bernie. We need to know whether he supports them.

Dershowitz is an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School and author of“Taking the Stand: My Life in the Law.”

Needelman-Race lost for the new East New York: De Blasio's Brooklyn building plan fails the discrimination test

Neighborhood on the brink

As the City Council readies to vote Wednesday on Mayor de Blasio’s proposed new development rules for a swath of Brooklyn, one basic question remains unaddressed: What is the plan for East New York’s current residents?

That question matters because East New York anchors one of the city’s greatest concentrations of black and Latino residents, who account for 90% of the area’s population. The median income for a family of three is just $34,512, among the city’s lowest, and half of the area’s households spend a too-high 35% or more of their income on rent.

PROTESTS PLANNED OVER EAST NEW YORK REZONING

The mayor’s rezoning plan would allow for large-scale new development that must include some affordable housing — aimed at tenants earning about $46,000 a year. That’s simply unaffordable to the area’s residents. While the city promises to subsidize apartments for lower-income households, even these are priced too high for the majority of East New York residents.

Add in an expected influx of market-rate housing, and the East New York plan in and of itself would make New York City on the whole a less black and Latino place.

Yet the de Blasio administration has failed to study the potential for discriminatory racial impacts of the East New York zoning — a failure that’s more than just morally shocking. Such a review is required under federal fair housing laws. So is a meaningful response.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development requires the city, as a recipient of federal funds, to affirmatively further fair housing when rezoning — to address the vast housing needs of residents in racially and ethnically concentrated areas of poverty. The city is obligated to not just avoid perpetuating segregation but also to take steps to create opportunities for fair housing.

In communities like East New York, this means preventing the displacement of low-income residents of color — rather than pushing them out to bring in waves of new faces who can afford much higher rents. That is anything but residential integration.

New York City’s fair housing failures are not new. In 2009, we represented a community coalition that challenged the city’s proposed rezoning of 30 acres at the intersection of Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant for housing development. City officials testified that — in blatant violation of federal civil rights laws — they never analyze nor consider the racial impacts of their rezonings.

We’ve seen what happens when the city neglects to even ask whether its zoning plans discriminate, never mind tackle the consequences. The Williamsburg-Greenpoint waterfront rezoning of 2005 led to skyrocketing rents, displacing low-income residents of color who had lived in these communities for generations.

History must not repeat itself. Almost 50 years after fair housing became the law of the land, any proposed rezoning by city government must pass this basic test.

Beginning with East New York and continuing with more than a dozen promised future rezonings, from Flushing and Long Island City in Queens to the Bronx’s Jerome Ave. and Staten Island’s Bay St., the city cannot use the veil of purportedly affordable housing as an excuse to neglect the real needs of low-income black and Latino communities.

Accurate and truly fair housing analyses, with a view toward identifying and remedying the racial impacts of rezonings, will lift this veil. East New York is an essential place to start.

Needelman, Krishnan and Louis are attorneys at Brooklyn Legal Services Corporation A.

Holzer-The Republicans in N.Y., in 1860: Remembering Abraham Lincoln at Cooper Union

‘Right makes might.” With those uplifting words, one of the Republican presidential contenders calmed the angry electorate in his final appeal for support from New York. If the language doesn’t sound much like the “We will build a wall” or “I hate New York values” diatribes permeating the current push for Republican support here, that’s because “right makes might” was intoned seven score and sixteen years ago by Abraham Lincoln.

It came during his one and only New York campaign appearance: Feb. 27, 1860, at Cooper Union.

Admittedly, political races were different then. Presidential primaries did not yet exist. Delegates were chosen at back-room state conventions. And White House aspirants did not exactly beat the bushes on their own behalf — it was considered unseemly.

2016 ELECTION: DELEGATE TRACKER

Campaigns were also mercifully shorter. Lincoln’s New York “rally” took place less than three months before Republicans gathered in Chicago to nominate their presidential candidate. But Lincoln-era campaigning did demand vast command of the issues and the ability to speak coherently, and inspiringly, both on the stump and for print.

A serious candidate was expected to hold forth on the issues of the day for hours at a time. No sound bites, no warm-and-fuzzy “town halls,” no robo-calls.

Still, the 1860 race for the Republican nomination grew intensely interesting in New York. Some local party stalwarts had turned against their home-grown front-runner — sound familiar? — anti-slavery Sen. William H. Seward. It was not that the state’s Republicans did not embrace Seward’s positions. Some simply worried that voters outside New York would regard him as a wild-eyed radical, reject him and bring down the young political party.

A moderate, especially one hailing from the West, they argued, could not only sweep the East in the fall, but score well in heartland swing states like Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. So a breakaway group calling itself the Young Men’s Central Republican Union — in fact sponsored by not-so-young, but enormously powerful, pro-Republican newspaper editors Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune and William Cullen Bryant of the New York Post — announced a series of speeches by western Republicans, meant as auditions for local support. (Sorry: the Daily News of the time, no relation, was Democratic and pro-South.)

For a long-time leader like Sen. Salmon Chase of Ohio, the invitation seemed almost insulting. He turned it down. A few second-tier aspirants, however, like Chase’s fellow Buckeye, Sen. Tom Corwin, jumped at the chance. Corwin created a mild sensation with a rip-roaring stem-winder at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn.

New York Daily News front pages on the presidential election

DAILY NEWS EDITORIAL BOARD ENDORSES HILLARY CLINTON

Alone among the invitees, however, only Lincoln of Illinois sensed the huge — yuuuge — opportunity the invitation presented. For whatever stranglehold Seward may have had on the party machinery and its delegate-selection process, “Old Abe” believed he could talk past the establishment and appeal to the New York newspapers whose mainstream media editorials reached far beyond the city and state.

Lincoln also made sure he was the last of the speakers. In fact, by the time he set foot here, the original series had technically ended. The organizers chose a different venue: the newly opened Cooper Union in Manhattan, not far from Newspaper Row.

Lincoln constructed an image-altering speech for the occasion. Famous for joke-riddled debates and stump speeches, he did a deep dive into constitutional history to make the scholarly argument that the Founding Fathers intended the federal government — not voters in new territories, as Democrats insisted — should decide the future of slavery. With that fact forcibly proven, Lincoln went on to assure the South that he would not threaten slavery where it already existed, but merely ban its spread absolutely, placing it, he conceded, on “a course of ultimate extinction.”

Then, after two hours, came the unforgettable conclusion. Slavery was an evil and its opponents could never give up the fight to destroy it, he proclaimed, even if victory came in small increments over a long period of time: “Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”

The elite audience of 1,500, quiet at first, erupted into wild cheers. An eyewitness who had at first recoiled at Lincoln’s nasal twang and discordant gestures, declared: “He’s the greatest man since St. Paul.”

Lincoln made a few more speeches in New England, then headed home — never to give another 1860 political speech. He had said it all in New York. Seward, who still entered the contested May convention with a seemingly insurmountable delegate lead, fell short on the first ballot. By the third ballot, Seward's support had collapsed, and the veteran of but one New York speech was the presidential candidate. The rest, of course, is history.