BEIJING, April 23 (UPI) -- The National Energy Administration in China said the country's demand for energy is growing faster than previously reported.

The NEA said demand for electricity would grow up to 12 percent in 2011 with total consumption reaching up to 4.69 trillion kilowatt hours, China's state-run Xinhua news agency reported Saturday.

In January, the NEA estimated China's demand for electricity would grow 9 percent this year compared to 2010.

(Reuters) - Up to 200,000 deaths from severe malaria could be averted each year if malarial countries were to switch to a more expensive but more effective drug, the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said Tuesday.

In a report on the mosquito-borne disease, MSF said data from recent trials in Africa had shown that the drug, called artesunate, was more effective and easier to use than quinine, a cheaper malaria medicine often used in poorer countries.

Palaeontologists characterize mass extinctions as times when the Earth loses more than three-quarters of its species in a geologically short interval, as has happened only five times in the past 540 million years or so. Biologists now suggest that a sixth mass extinction may be under way, given the known species losses over the past few centuries and millennia.