By Mark Duff, BBC News

媒体英语会带大家一起学习 BBC 撰稿人在报道世界大事时常用到的单词和短语。

Background: 以几个小时的劳动来换取一点自由应该是很小的代价。可是意大利最臭名昭著的犯人之一，黑寡妇，却断然拒绝了法庭提出的假释条件。她在1998年因谋杀罪被判29年。

Patrizia Reggiani once said she'd rather cry in a Rolls (Royce) than be happy on a bicycle. She doesn't seem to have changed her mind.

Dubbed the Black Widow after she was jailed for ordering the murder of her ex-husband, the heir to the Gucci family fortune, Ms Reggiani has spent most of the past 13 years at San Vittore prison in Milan.

Judges had offered her the chance of day release, if she agreed to take a job outside the prison walls. But Ms Reggiani, who's 63, was having none of it. She'd never worked in her life, she told the judges, and she didn't intend to start now.

Her trial in 1998 attracted worldwide interest. It had everything: a woman betrayed by the man she'd loved and the low-life murder of the heir to a multi-million dollar fashion fortune.

For now, though, Patrizia Reggiani, who once complained that her allowance of more than US$630,000 a year wasn't enough to live on, will return to the comfort of her pet ferret and her plants in her cell at San Vittore.

• release [ri´li:s]   vt&n.释放；放松；赦免   (初中英语单词)
• allowance [ə´lauəns]   n.津贴；配给量；考虑   (初中英语单词)
• bicycle [´baisik(ə)l]   n.自行车   (高中英语单词)