New York City – For Jessica Dejesus, deciding who to vote for as the next mayor of New York City came down to the final minutes.

The 40-year-old resident of the Mott Haven neighbourhood in the Bronx admittedly had not been following the race closely, but planned to vote for former Governor Andrew Cuomo. She recalled his near-nightly television appearances when he was governor of New York State amid the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“He was our guy during the pandemic,” she reflected.

But a day before the election, Dejesus saw a video on TikTok detailing US President Donald Trump’s endorsement of Cuomo.

While her feelings towards the candidates in the mayoral race may be ho-hum, Dejesus knows she is no fan of Trump. The nod made her give upstart candidate Social Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, a closer look.

“We can’t have that. I don’t disagree with everything Trump does, but he cut back on food stamps, and that affects a lot of people,” she said, referring to restrictions on US Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits in a bill passed by Trump and Republicans earlier this year.

“I understand you have to stop bad people coming over the border, but there are a lot of good immigrants here as well,” she said, referring to Trump’s mass deportation drive.

Walking into her voting site, she told Al Jazeera she still had not made up her mind. “I’ll have to wait until that paper’s in front of me,” she said.

Moments later, she emerged: “I voted for Mamdani!” she said.

‘You really have no choice’

A neighbourhood like Mott Haven, which was solidly mixed during the June primary in its turnout for Mamdani and Cuomo, shows just how reactive Trump’s endorsement could be to the race: a poison pill for some and a final nail in the coffin for others.

Trump, meanwhile, hoped his endorsement, soon followed by that of billionaire Elon Musk, would help rally conservative New Yorkers who came out in atypically large numbers in the city’s 2024 presidential election.

“Whether you personally like Andrew Cuomo or not, you really have no choice,” Trump said in a social media post on Monday.

“You must vote for him and hope he does a fantastic job. He is capable of it, Mamdani is not!”

Cuomo has also been explicitly reaching out to Republicans, hoping to court their votes. About 11 percent of New York’s 4.7 million voters were registered with the Republican Party in 2024.

Recent polls have shown Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa carrying about 14 percent of the vote – not a huge amount, but potentially enough to close Mamdani’s lead over the former governor.

It remained unclear how successful the action from Trump – who has also threatened to target city funding if Mamdani was elected – would be. But for some staunch supporters of Sliwa, Trump’s intervention did little to change their minds.

“[Trump’s endorsement] doesn’t change my vote. Sliwa is for the people and I have faith in that,” said Artemio Figuero, a 59-year-old city street cleaner, who spoke to Al Jazeera in Jackson Heights, Queens.

“He was a protector of the neighbourhood,” Figuero added, referring to Sliwa’s stewardship of the vigilante anti-crime Guardian Angels group.

Other Republicans who had long grown accustomed to voting outside of their party in the liberal-dominated local elections saw Trump’s support as a positive development, if not a game-changer.

“I like that Trump endorsed him,” Lola Ferguson, a 53-year-old social worker and registered Republican who was already planning to vote for Cuomo, told Al Jazeera in Mott Haven.

“He knows that [Cuomo’s] the better match for the city,” she said.

Cuomo, for his part, has denied Trump’s endorsement counts, noting that Trump had referred to him as a “bad Democrat” compared to Mamdani, whom he falsely called a “communist”.

Still, for Mamdani supporters, Trump’s move was not unexpected. Cuomo has been supported by an array of the city’s wealthiest residents, including billionaires like Bill Ackman and Miriam Adelson, who have also backed Trump.

“Birds of a feather flock together,” said Andre Augustine, a 33-year-old who works at a college access nonprofit, who voted for Mamdani.

“I feel like the signs were already there. All the folks that were financing Trump’s campaign were also financing Cuomo’s, and I feel like [Cuomo] just wouldn’t be honest about it,” he said.

For others, Trump’s endorsement was the feather that broke the camel’s back.

Dominique Witter, 39, a healthcare tech consultant, respected Cuomo’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in the city, but had been gradually shifting towards Mamdani.

She did not decide on Mamdani until the final sprint of the race.

“It took me a while to get there, but I’m voting for Mamdani,” she told Al Jazeera as she prepared to vote in Mott Haven.

“I’m not gonna lie; the Trump endorsement did not help. Because that’s not what we want, right?” she said.

“Oh no, that’s not an endorsement you want.”

A Philippine military helicopter crashed during search and rescue operations, killing all six people on board.

The death toll from Typhoon Kalmaegi in the Philippines has reached 46, including six people on a military helicopter that crashed during the powerful storm that unleashed heavy rains and floods across the central region of the country.

Floodwaters trapped many people on their roofs and submerged cars on Tuesday, and entire towns on the island of Cebu have been inundated.

At least 39 people were killed in the central province of Cebu, local authorities said. One person was reported dead on the nearby island of Bohol.

The Huey helicopter went down in Agusan del Sur on the island of Mindanao, where it was conducting a humanitarian disaster response mission, the military said. Six bodies of the crew were recovered and an investigation was under way.

In the 24 hours before Typhoon Kalmaegi, locally named Tino, made landfall shortly before midnight on Monday, the area around provincial capital Cebu City was deluged with 183 millimetres (seven inches) of rain, well in excess its 131-millimetre monthly average, state weather specialist Charmagne Varilla told AFP.

“The water rose so fast,” Don del Rosario, 28, told the news wire AFP from Cebu City. “By 4:00am, it was already uncontrollable — people couldn’t get out [of their houses].”

“I’ve been here for 28 years, and this is by far the worst we’ve experienced.”

In a Facebook post on Tuesday, provincial governor Pamela Baricuatro called the situation in Cebu “unprecedented”.

“We were expecting the winds to be the dangerous part, but … the water is what’s truly putting our people at risk,” Baricuatro said on Facebook. “The floodwaters are just devastating.”

Although the storm gradually lost strength on Tuesday, it continued to lash the country with winds of 120km/h (74.5mph) and gusts of 165km/h (102.5mph) as it swept across the Visayas islands headed for northern Palawan and towards the South China Sea.

Tens of thousands of residents were evacuated across the Visayas region, including parts of southern Luzon and northern Mindanao, authorities said. The typhoon was expected to leave the Philippines late on Wednesday or early Thursday.

“Due to interaction with the terrain, Tino may slightly weaken while crossing Visayas. However, it is expected to remain at typhoon intensity throughout its passage over the country,” state weather agency PAGASA said in a morning bulletin.

The Philippines is hit by an average of 20 storms and typhoons each year, routinely striking disaster-prone areas where millions live in poverty. The Philippines was hit by two major storms in September, including Super Typhoon Ragasa, which killed at least three people and forced thousands to evacuate from villages and schools in Northern Philippines.

Kalmaegi is forecast to make landfall on Thursday night in Vietnam’s central regions, which have already suffered heavy floods that killed at least 40 people and left six others missing over the past week.

Tanzania Presidential Press Unit via Reuters

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As President Trump has imposed steep tariffs on China, American importers are buying much less.

But the rest of the world is making up the difference, buying more from China than ever.

China has offset the decline from America with breathtaking speed. Shipments to other parts of the world have surged this year, demonstrating that China’s manufacturing dominance will not be easily slowed. Chinese exports are on track to reach another record this year.

That’s because China was prepared. It has been seeking out new customers for years, and its massive manufacturing investment allows it to sell goods at low prices.

“They should not be surprised that China is able to find markets outside of the advanced economies,” said Mary Lovely, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Last week, Mr. Trump reduced the tariffs he imposed on China, though they remain at heights not seen in decades. He insists that his tariffs will force a revival of American factories and create jobs — a pledge that is contested by many economists and manufacturing experts. It is also unclear how effective his policies will be in stemming the flow of goods that originate in China and route through other countries before arriving in the United States.

The rest of the world is caught between the two superpowers. Some countries, including Vietnam 28% and members of the European Union 11%, are deeply concerned about the risk posed by China’s exports to their own industries, and China faces a backlash in the form of tariffs in regions like Europe. Other nations, like Argentina 57% and Nigeria 45%, are buying low-cost Chinese technology to modernize their economies but running up wider trade imbalances with China.

For years, Americans have turned to China to outfit their homes and stock their offices. While the volume of Chinese exports remains enormous, the declines this year are widespread and drastic. The United States is buying less of almost everything from China:

Take, for example, plastic goods. China exported $5 billion of those products — from laundry baskets to plastic forks — to the United States between July and October, down 16 percent from a year earlier.

Last year, over a quarter of all Chinese-made furniture, including mattresses and lamps, went to the United States; now that number is closer to a fifth.

China’s exports of phones 47% and computers 54% to the United States were among the categories that declined the most. Mr. Trump exempted such consumer electronics from most of his tariffs this year, but Apple, Hewlett-Packard and other manufacturers have continued to diversify their supply chains outside China. The United States now gets most of its smartphones from India and its laptop computers from Vietnam, according to the latest U.S. government data.

Meanwhile, China is flooding developing economies in Africa 42% and South America 13% with cars, trucks, bikes and ships; it is expanding in Europe 7% and Asia 14% by shipping batteries and iron products.

After decades of top-down priorities established by Beijing’s industrial policies, China has become the world’s leading producer of cars, batteries and solar panels. Struggling consumer demand in its domestic economy has put even more pressure on Chinese companies to find new business abroad.

China also produced record amounts of steel over the past few years. This is now sold across the world at prices sometimes cheaper than bottled water.

Many African countries bought few of these items from China before this year. China sold only about 100 electric cars to Nigeria two years ago; this year it has already sold thousands. Solar panel shipments to Algeria thus far this year are already nearly four times that of all of last year.

China’s growing exports to Africa come as Mr. Trump has pulled back aid to the continent. Chinese companies are sacrificing profits by selling to Africa at low prices, but are, in many cases, gaining influence.

“The margins may not be as high,” said Ilaria Mazzocco, a deputy director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But for those markets, it’s entirely transformational to have access to this technology at affordable prices.”

There are exceptions to China’s ability to successfully make up for lost revenue by selling to American customers and redirecting exports elsewhere. Chinese companies, for example, make most of the world’s toys, and the United States has long been its largest customer. Over the summer, China’s exports of video game consoles, costumes and board games fell $3.5 billion over last year, mostly due to a steep decline in shipments to the United States.

It remains to be seen how effective Mr. Trump will be in pressuring countries, especially those in Asia, to reject rerouted Chinese exports as part of trade negotiations. These workarounds limited the impact of his trade measures with China during his first term.

One thing is certain: American consumers are buying more goods from other parts of Asia. In September, Thailand’s exports to the United States rose by 33 percent. Taiwan’s exports also grew by 51 percent, and Singapore’s by 13 percent.

The shifts in China’s exports are part of what is expected to be a continuing and unpredictable transformation. Mr. Trump’s tariff reduction last week, which he said lowered overall tariffs on China to about 45 percent from about 55 percent, could stabilize China’s exports to the United States, said Gerard DiPippo, associate director of the RAND China Research Center.

But despite agreeing to a one-year trade truce with China, Mr. Trump is considering whether to impose additional tariffs on industries dominated by China, such as pharmaceuticals and drones. He is vowing to wean America off its reliance on China for some critical minerals. With more than three years left in office, Mr. Trump’s campaign to reshape trade is unlikely to end here.