TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's banking minister Shizuka Kamei, an advocate of big spending, said on Friday he would quit the cabinet, improving the chances that Prime Minister Naoto Kan can forge ahead with efforts to rein in the country's huge debt. Kan, who took over the nation's top job after his unpopular predecessor quit abruptly last week, has made tackling a public debt that is already twice the size of Japan's GDP a top priority amid market concerns about sovereign debt risk. But while Kamei's departure, sparked by a spat over a controversial bill to roll back postal privatisation, removes one obstacle, how aggressively Kan can implement fiscal reforms will depend on the results of an upper house election, likely on July 11. Support for the Democrats, who must win the July vote, has jumped since Kan took over, and Kamei's resignation could be another plus, analysts said. ''My sense is that Kamei leaving will probably increase public support for Kan, because it looks as though he isn't going to be pushed around by Kamei,'' said Columbia University professor Gerald Curtis. ''It's a good thing, because Kamei was constantly baiting the prime minister and undermining the authority of the office.''

6,684 Vietnamese trafficked abroad

HANOI (dpa) - Police said at least 6,684 Vietnamese women and children have been trafficked abroad since 2005, state media reported Friday. The statistics represented a rare effort by authorities to put a number on a problem all agree is serious but that resists easy quantification. The Ministry of Public Security presented the statistics at a conference in Ho Chi Minh City on educating children to avoid trafficking, the newspaper Thanh Nien said. The ministry said 65 percent of the women and children trafficked were sent to China. Other countries frequently cited as destinations of trafficking for sexual exploitation and forced labour included Malaysia, Taiwan, Cambodia, Thailand and South Korea. Thanh Nien quoted Huynh Van Dung, chief of the Social Crime Investigation Department in the southern province of Tay Ninh, as saying trafficking of women and children was ''on the rise.''

Fake drugs: A $200-B industry

PARIS (Reuters) - Counterfeit drugs have become a $200-billion-a-year industry and the 176-nation World Customs Organization (WCO) will sign a declaration later this month to fight the scourge, an official said on Thursday. Fake or substandard versions of medicines are often hidden in cargoes sent on circuitous routes to mask their country of origin. ''We have more fakes than real drugs in the market,'' said Christophe Zimmermann, the WCO's anti-counterfeiting and piracy coordinator. ''In 2007-2008 alone, it rose 596 percent.'' Pharmacies and back street merchants in Africa sell fake medicines at rock-bottom prices. The World Trade Organization (WTO) says fake anti-malaria drugs kill 100,000 Africans a year and the black market deprives governments of 2.5-5 percent of their revenue.

Sick 9/11 workers get new settlement

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Attorneys for thousands of workers who suffered health problems stemming from the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center reached a revised $712- million settlement with New York City on Thursday. In March a federal judge rejected an initial settlement of up to $657.5 million, saying it needed to be more transparent and that too much of the money – about one-third – would be spent on lawyers' fees. Nearly 10,000 firefighters, police, contractors and others who worked at ''Ground Zero'' in the ruins of the World Trade Center sued the city and its contractors for claims of injuries associated with their rescue and clean-up work. The settlement will be drawn from a federally financed insurance fund -- the WTC Captive Insurance Company -- created in 2004 with a $1 billion grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.