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As a news portal, duplicate content is unavoidable (unless you make up your own news, which actually has been known to do well...) If you are selling articles, the buyers will tag them for their websites. If they leave them index, follow and put their own canonical on them (common, in my experience) be aware that they can outrank you for your own content if their site has more authority. And having the same content on many sites with conflicting canonicals probably is not going to be worth much SEO-wise for any of them. As far as articles that are given to you, you should use the canonical of the originating site to give them credit for creating the material. This won't get you search traffic, but readers on your site would have the content right there at their fingertips, and would not have to go to another site to read it. I tend to think that noindex-nofollowing a substantial fraction of your site might raise some red flags. The assumption here is that the content duplication is being made simply as a convenience to the readers. If you are doing it to increase your rankings, it probably won't work. Excellent, original content should stay on your own site and not be sold.

Go with the subdomain that is just targeted to Portuguese, the language. Use an HREFLANG tag to tell Google which pages are translations of an equivalent English page. This will allow you to get traffic from a number of countries that speak Portuguese. I am of course assuming that your content doesn't change other than the translation. Don't geo-locate unless you mean to actually target a country. If you want to go after the Brazilian market with different content that is just for Brazilian citizens, then geo-locate. In that case you can use a ccTLD (those are only for geolocation), subdomain, or subfolder. That's up to you, but only when you are ready to actually geo-target your content.

I believe your current configuration is hurting your long term SEO. My preferences would rank as follows: company name + country specific TLD (company.de, company.uk, company.com subdomain on .com uk.company.com, de.company.com directory on .com company.com/uk/, company.com/de/ That's my .02