Janet Jalil

Certainly there are no reports at this stage of any loss of life and nothing of severe infrastructure damage.

Yet there had been big fears that this could be the worst cyclone Australia had ever experienced.

It's all part of a pattern, isn't it, of more and more extreme weather events affecting Australians?

What we tend to get is in the days after these cyclones is lots and lots of flooding, rivers bursting their banks, creeks, roads overflowing.

But the authorities have praised residents for following orders to shelter in place.

It sounds like the authorities are dealing with this as effectively as they can.

A lot of the communities in far north Queensland are indigenous communities.

There's a lot of issues around language, for example, about getting the message to these groups to get communities which are perhaps quite isolated to stay indoors.

Simon Atkinson in Queensland in Australia.

For years, Cubans have lived a precarious existence, suffering food and medicine shortages and power cuts, partly because of the long-running US economic embargo and partly because of the mismanagement of their communist rulers.

But the plight of people living in Cuba further worsened after the US seized the Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, in January.

This meant Cuba lost its main oil supplier, with the island experiencing a total blackout at one point.

Now an aid convoy called Nuestra America has arrived on the island, part of an international effort to deliver badly needed aid supplies and to protest at the American oil blockade.

Ilaria Salas is an Italian member of the European Parliament and was on the convoy.

She spoke to Krupa Padi from Havana.

When you assess the situation on the whole, you've got the lack of food, lack of access to so many goods.

And as you say, the embargo has simply made things worse.

What do you think the people of Cuba need the most?

That was Ilaria Salas, an Italian MEP.

And we have more on this on our YouTube channel.