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On Google WMT, there's an option for preferred domain setting. You can use this. But I do agree with Ryan that it'll solve the issue only for Google not for other search engines.

Yes...it should be redirected to www. through .hactess or it can be done through Google webmaster tools.

It's quite difficult to provide the exact data as Google algorithm is Google's hidden treasure. Better to keep yourself safe by creating completely unique content, Referring to your example of Wikipedia definition, you can add something like " ACCORDING TO WIKIPEDIA ..... " while copying definition or adding reference links while copying any content from other sources.

Remember that Google is  not only giving importance to unique content but it should be of high quality. That means the article should be innovative like a complete new thing & well researched, so it mustn't be of 200 or less words. So Google will compare the quality of the whole article with the copied content & then it'll decide whether it's a duplicate content article or not.

I've been doing link building from last 2 + years & on my experience nofollow links carry very little SEO value. For many clients I've been giving high quality dofollow links and working fine in Google for boosting rank. According to Matt Cutts of Google, Google doesn't count nofollow back links, even I experimented about it by giving relevant nofollow back links to one site for few days and check very little development in ranking but once I added some PR5+ dofollow back links for that site, the rank start boosting quickly. Even I'm running some campaigns here in SEOMOZ.... I've found that sites having high value of ratio of dofollow to nofollow are ranking top. In this SEO world, I've found that many SEO experts are telling that mixing up of dofollow & nofollow back links look natural to search engines, that's true but the bitter truth is dofollow back link has much more SEO value than that of nofollow back link, especially for Google.

The site is just looking like a site of a blog network. The domain is 5 years old & the home page has DA  & PA of 34 still not indexed by Google. I searched for site:livingorganicnews.com in Google which is not giving any results. So it shows that the site is penalized by Google. Use Google webmaster tools for further verification so as to find the reason.

Most probably it's penalized because of being a site of a paid blog network.