Berliners reject religious lessons

Berliners rejected Sunday giving the city's secondary school children the choice of religious education lessons instead of mandatory ethics classes, preliminary results from a referendum showed.
With 95.5 percent of votes counted, 51.3 percent said "no" to offering the classes alongside the ethics lessons, introduced in 2006 after the "honour killing" of a woman by her brother in Berlin's sizeable Muslim minority.
Although the margin of victory given by Berlin's electoral commission was small, the "yes" vote would have failed in any case because only 22.8 percent of the German capital's 2.4 million voters cast ballots. For a "yes" result to have been valid, at least 25 percent or 610,000 people would have had to voted in favour.