Stones drummer has cancer

London — Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts, 63, is being treated for throat cancer, a spokesman for the band said Saturday.

Watts’ illness was diagnosed in June, and he has completed four weeks of a six-week course of radiotherapy at London’s Royal Marsden Hospital.

“He is expecting to make a full recovery and start work with the rest of the band later in the year,” the spokesman said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

He said Watt’s treatment had not interfered with any tour or recording plans for the Stones, who have been “relaxing between work commitments” after a world tour last year.

David Crosby takes on Enron

Houston — He was intimate with the counterculture in the 1960s and a Texas prison in the 1980s. Now the current decade has prompted David Crosby to train his pen and his voice on corporate crime — primarily Enron and its founder, Kenneth Lay.

The 5 1/2-minute song “They Want It All” that Crosby wrote for a new CD with Graham Nash, “Crosby-Nash,” faults corporate leaders for bleeding companies of money and ripping off employees.

One lyric says: “These people that they stole from whose lives they laid to waste/They should meet them all face to face/And explain just why their mama didn’t teach them not to steal/If you want us to believe in justice, justice better be real.”

“If they can bust me, they can bust him,” Crosby said. “The law should work for everybody.”

Thug or not, De Niro’s Italian

Rome — Italy plans to grant Robert De Niro honorary citizenship, rejecting opposition from an Italian-American organization that says the actor has projected a bad image with numerous roles as an Italian thug.

Culture Minister Giuliano Urbani still wants to grant De Niro honorary citizenship during next month’s Venice Film Festival.

The Order Sons of Italy in America wrote a letter to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi earlier this week, urging him to cancel the planned honor.

The letter argued: “He has done nothing to promote Italian culture in the United States. Instead, OSIA and its members hold him and his movies responsible for considerably damaging the collective reputations of both Italians and Italian-Americans.”

‘Apprentice’ also a pitchman

Philadelphia — Bill Rancic, who won a job with Donald Trump on “The Apprentice,” will moonlight as a spokesman for a credit card company.

Rancic will represent Advanta — a Spring House-based credit card company that caters to small businesses — in public appearances, media interviews and promotional campaigns.

Rancic, an Advanta cardholder, is working as “owner’s representative” in development of the 90-story Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago.

“I am in for the long run,” he said. “My goal is to be in deals with Donald Trump rather than doing them for him.”