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US President Joe Biden signed into law the first major federal gun reform in three decades, days after a decision, which he condemned, by the Supreme Court expanding firearm owners' rights.

"God willing, it's going to save a lot of lives," Biden said at the White House on Saturday after signing the bill with his wife Jill by his side.

The bipartisan bill came together just weeks after mass shootings in Uvalde and Buffalo that killed more than 30 people, including 19 children at an elementary school.

The law includes provisions to help states keep guns out of the hands of those deemed to be a danger to themselves or others.

The reform came the same week as the Supreme Court expanded gun owners' rights, saying on Thursday for the first time that the US Constitution protected an individual's ability to carry a handgun in public for self-defence.

"The Supreme Court has made some terrible decisions," Biden told reporters after that ruling, and another on Friday that eliminated the right to abortion nationwide.

Gun control has long been a divisive issue in the nation with several attempts to put new controls on gun sales failing time after time.

Biden, who is looking to improve sagging public approval ratings ahead of November 8 midterm elections for control of Congress, made securing victories on gun control a part of his campaign pitch to voters.

The new law blocks gun sales to those convicted of abusing unmarried intimate partners and cracks down on gun sales to purchasers convicted of domestic violence. It also provides new federal funding to states that administer "red flag" laws intended to remove guns from people deemed dangerous to themselves and others.

It does not ban sales of assault-style rifles or high-capacity magazines. But it does take some steps on background checks by allowing access, for the first time, to information on significant crimes committed by juveniles.

"At this time when it seems impossible to get anything done in Washington, we are doing something consequential: If we can reach compromise on guns, we oughta be able to reach compromise on other critical issues," Biden said before traveling to Germany for the Group of Seven rich nations summit.

"I know there's much more work to do, and I'm never gonna give up. But this is a monumental day."

© RAW 2022

Image: Gage Skidmore/Flickr

Mollie O'Callaghan has made it a hat-trick of golds while leading the mixed 4x100m relay quartet to Australia's first global landmark at this year's world swimming championships.

And Kaylee McKeown has underlined her standing as one of Australia's marquee swimmers with her first world championship triumph in the 200m backstroke in Budapest on a milestone penultimate day for the Dolphins.

Queenslander Kiah Melverton also got into the act, grabbing silver behind the ever-astonishing Katie Ledecky, who took her fifth consecutive 800m freestyle crown with another landslide win on Friday.

Yet even the incredible American couldn't top the performance of the day from the Dolphins' quartet of super-charged freestylers - Jack Cartwright, Kyle Chalmers, Madi Wilson and O'Callaghan, as they clocked a new world record of 3 minutes 19.38 seconds in the day's final event.

That shaved two-hundredths of a second off the record set by the United States at the last worlds in Gwangju, South Korea, in July 2019 as they blew away Canada (3:20.61) and the US (3:21.09).

"It's insane," declared the Rio Olympics 100m freestyle champ Chalmers.

"You have the world champion (O'Callaghan, 52.03sec), a girl who would probably have won silver if she'd been in the race (Wilson, 52.25), Jack (Cartwright, 48.12) coming back from shoulder surgery to swim an amazing first split ... I think we were always going to be hard to beat."

They were especially hard to beat thanks to Chalmers' own astonishing second leg, clocked at 46.98.

"I'm extremely happy, so proud of this team, it's just an amazing result," said O'Callaghan, who now boasts five medals from the championships, including three golds.

Pride of place had earlier gone to triple Olympic champion McKeown, who had previously won five world silvers, including two already this week in Budapest, but only broke her golden duck with a quite nail-biting triumph.

She just edged to victory with one final push for the wall, prevailing in 2:05.08, with American Phoebe Bacon just a fingernail behind in 2:05.12.

"To come away with a gold medal is pretty spectacular, I wasn't expecting to be here at the beginning of the year, so to come out with two individual podium swims is amazing," said McKeown, who also won silver in the 200m individual medley.

"I was really nervous coming in tonight off the back of last year but it's an awesome feeling."

It was also a night of high emotion for McKeown, who dedicated her medal to her late father.

"You'll quite often see me before my warm up, I'll sit on the edge of the pool and have a little a moment for myself. I believe in my little way that he is there every step of the way, so that's my thank you," she said.

The 20-year-old had bypassed her best event, the 100m backstroke, at which she holds the world record and is Olympic champion, to tackle the medley, a decision which had raised a few eyebrows.

But she was determined not to miss out in her other Olympic-winning discipline and timed her push for victory with split-second precision.

Bacon, the fastest qualifier, went for broke to open up a 0.64sec lead by half-way before McKeown gradually hauled her back on the third length and then began to just forge past in the final 10 metres.

Nobody had any chance against Ledecky in the 800m as she became the first athlete ever to win one discipline five times in a row and landed a 22nd world medal.

She won by more than 10 seconds in 8:08.04 but Melverton (8:18.77) swam the race of her life for the silver, her first individual global medal in the 50m pool.

© AAP 2022

Image: Rufino Uribe, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

If Australians don't have faith in the Reserve Bank's promise of a "narrow path" to avoid recession, they could end up being the cause of one, the central bank's governor Philip Lowe has warned.

If people start worrying that the path back from five per cent inflation to a more normal level is unrealistic, it might push the economy into a downward spiral, he says.

"There is a path to have inflation come down without the economy having too much pain, but it's a narrow path," Dr Lowe told a central bankers meeting in Zurich on Friday.

"But if people start to worry that we can't show that credible path back ... to two to three per cent inflation ... then I think that shift in psychology could be quite persistent. And we know where that ends - it ends in persistent inflation and then you've got to have much higher interest rates and an economic downturn to get inflation back down."

If people are confident in inflation being at or returning to normal levels, businesses do not feel the need to push up prices and employees do not feel the need to push for wage increases, he explained.

But over the past couple of decades, there has been a shift in "inflation psychology" with both businesses and employees showing more willingness to push for change.

"You can understand why people faced with high inflation want compensation for it - especially when the unemployment rate is as low as it is," he said.

Dr Lowe said the current high rate of inflation is the result of a better-than-expected COVID-19 bounce-back in the economy, persistent supply chain issues and the war in Ukraine.

"If you put them together ... it's not surprising inflation is so high and the challenge we all have is to bring it back down as painlessly as we can," he said.

But the Australian economy was showing remarkable resilience, he said.

'I'm not expecting there to be a recession ... but there are risks," he said.

Dr Lowe said he stood by his predictions that inflation would reach seven per cent by the end of the year, before easing off in the first quarter of next year.

Factors contributing to that assessment included temporary relief from some government taxes ending in December; COVID-related problems in the economy showing signs of resolution; the unlikelihood of seeing another dramatic hike in fuel prices; and higher interest rates constraining some spending.

"So we've got four things together that give us confidence inflation will start trending lower next year. That's not to say we won't get another shock, but they're pretty powerful influences," he said

"The question we're now grappling with is how fast the decline in inflation will be."

© AAP 2022

Image: https://pixabay.com/zh/photos/money-australia-notes-dollars-6010252/ (free image)