Farther south, in Johnson County, I came upon a sheriff's office that had confiscated an out-of-state driver's cash, in the absence of contraband, in exchange for a handwritten receipt that gave the traveller no information about who had just taken his money, why, or how he might get it back.
One of the roots of the uprising traces back to the murder of Khaled Said, 28, beaten to death by plain-clothes police in an Alexandrian cybercafe in June, 2010, days after posting an online video of narcotics officers sharing out confiscated drugs among themselves.
"All pieces for a puzzle that we can no longer complete because there are too many bits missing, whited out, emptied out, alienated, confiscated, sold.
At the end of the film the girl must pick her confiscated rabbit out of a whole herd of similar rabbits... R.M. Lockley, the author of"The Private Lives of the Rabbit," observed that there's not much to choose between us.
All the pets, he pointed out, were confiscated.
It's as if the Bush administration had come right out and confiscated our home phones because, really, wire-tapping was such a pain.
He picked up two big plastic bags full of things that had been confiscated and dumped them out: wallets, family photographs, I.D. cards, all of them strewn across the carpet where people prayed.
He said he did so to right the injustices of the colonial era, which concentrated farmland in the hands of whites, but much of the confiscated land was doled out as patronage to ZANU-PF's governing elite.
In Morelia, the capital of Michoacan, another state controlled by the PRI, doctors from the state attorney general's office handed out medicines, confiscated by the state police from criminals, to voters in poor neighborhoods who agreed to sign a pledge to vote for PRI candidates, according to a complaint filed by Guadalupe Sanchez, a congresswoman from Mr. Cardenas's party.
While western studies have tended to focus on books that were clandestine, banned, confiscated, or smuggled out of the USSR, Westerman (once a student of hydraulic engineering) is more interested in the works of converts, hangers-on, backsliders and doubters.
