The holiday weekend gave way to a tumultuous week full of significant and somber headlines. Here are three stories we’ve been following closely:

On Monday, the IMF announced that they will include the Chinese yuan in the SDR’s basket of currencies. When James Rickards appeared on Mises Weekends in September, he discussed the interest of financial elites in making the SDR the new reserve currency of the world. This week, he reminded us, “The decision to include the yuan in the SDR is a political decision, not an economic one.”

Meanwhile in Brazil, facing a collapsing economy and months of street protests, impeachment charges were announced against President Dilma Rousseff. While the serious challenges facing Brazil go far beyond a single politician, the work of Helio Beltrão and Mises Institute Brazil offers hope for a freer future.

Lastly, Wednesday’s tragic shooting in San Bernardino is already being exploited by the Obama administration and others on the left for a renewed push for gun control. Of course it is government, not gun ownership, that makes Americans less safe. As Jeff Deist noted following the attacks in Paris, “when state intelligence and security agencies fail spectacularly, their budgets and personnel increase. Nobody gets fired, nobody apologizes.”

Our Mises Weekends guest is Łukasz Dominiak, a professor at Nicolaus Copernicus University and a former Mises Fellow, he joins Jeff to discuss the recent elections in Poland. The media characterized those elections as a triumph for the right-wing, and dismissed large street protests as xenophobic nationalism. But the truth as Łukasz explains is quite different: it’s a strange mix of both left and right politics in a country that is not afraid to embrace its Catholic roots and its cultural identity.

And in case you missed any of them, here are this week’s featured Mises Daily articles and some of our most popular articles at Mises Wire:

• The Problem With “Rules-Based” Monetary Policy by Tommy Behnke
• Can the US Dollar Face Down the Chinese Yuan? by James Rickards
• How Money Disappears in a Fractional-Reserve Money System by Frank Shostak
• We Must Be “Opportunists” In Dismantling the State by Joseph Salerno
• Will Brazil Impeach Rousseff? by Bruno Gonçalves Rosi
• Borders Closing Across Europe: Norway Joins In by Ryan McMaken
• Hunger and War in WWI Germany: Remembering the Slaughter of Pigs by T. Hunt Tooley
• Transcript: Jim Rickards on Currency Wars
• Brazil: Big Government, Small Wages by Ryan McMaken
• A Behind the Scenes Look at the November Jobs Report by Jonathan Newman
• Rothbard on Libertarian Populism by Jeff Deist
• How Governments Can Manipulate Murder Rates by Excluding “Terrorist” Killings by Ryan McMaken
• Incentives, Ideology, and Climate Change by Peter G. Klein
• Extreme Poverty Worldwide Has Plummeted as Market Economics Has Spread by Ryan McMaken
• In the 19th Century, Non-Citizens in the US Could Vote in 22 States and Territories by Ryan McMaken
• Robert Wenzel on the Cato Monetary Conference by David Gordon
• The November-December Issue of ‘The Austrian’ Is Now Online