From a story with no byline at WorldNetDaily:
Slavery is shockingly common in the world today: in homes, factories, farms and brothels. The most common form is bonded servitude, or holding people to work off debts with stratospheric interest rates. One widely held estimate puts the number of people in slavery at 27 million. The U.S. CIA estimates that up to 900,000 people are sold across international borders each year. The trade is illegal, and officially condemned, throughout the world. Yet it flourishes, earning perhaps $7 billion a year for its perpetrators.
The U.S. Department of State lists 72 nations – including Brazil, China and the Czech Republic – that aid slavery or are home to it. The five countries below are singled out as "countries whose governments do not fully comply with the minimum standards [to eliminate trafficking in humans] and are not making significant efforts to do so":
Burma: Internal factory work and prostitution; export to the Asian sex trade.Cuba: Forced labor; sexual exploitation connected with the government-run tourism industry.
Liberia: Forcible conscription in the military as laborers, soldiers and sex slaves.
North Korea: Forced labor; export of brides to China.
Sudan: Sex slaves, domestic workers, laborers and soldiers.
Problem here: I recognized that language from Quentin Hardy's cover story in the January 12, 2004 issue of Forbes, which can be read here. The first paragraph I quoted appears on page 76 of my copy of Forbes, while the rest appears in a sidebar, entitled "Bottom of the Barrel," on page 78.
In the original Hardy story, the first sentence ends in "on every continent except Antarctica." Otherwise, the material is lifted word for word, with no attribution to either Quentin Hardy or Forbes.
I'll be contacting WorldNetDaily about this. I'm sure it's an honest mistake, so there shouldn't be a problem with issuing a correction and an apology, right?
[Update, February 23, 2004: They never did. That first plagiarized paragraph now begins, "As Forbes recently reported..." Big deal. "Forbes" is not italicized, as it should be to indicate that it's the title of a magazine, and both paragraphs are used word for word without a quotation mark to indicate that that's what's been done.]