Author: Ely Valendez

Miss Pearl of the Orient 2026 winner Lanelle Cajucom

Lanelle Aira Cajucom Won the Crown. Now She Has to Make It Useful

Published by

Lanelle Aira Cajucom now holds a national crown. Now comes the hard part. On Friday night, August 14, inside the Robert B. Estrella Sr. Memorial Stadium in Rosales, Pangasinan, the Nueva Ecija representative was named Miss Pearl of the Orient Philippines 2026. Mariel Baltazar, the outgoing 2025 titleholder, crowned her. It was a tidy transfer of power for a pageant that is still young enough to be defining itself as it goes. Launched in 2024 by Oriental Beauty Philippines Charities Inc., Miss Pearl of the Orient Philippines has positioned itself around female leadership, cultural preservation and community service, with the motto Service Beyond the Crown. The organization was founded by pageant director Makoy Manlapaz of Gouldian Training & Events and JM Robles of JM Pageantry Innovations. But Miss Pearl is also becoming a pathway to a much bigger stage. Its inaugural winner, Krishan Pauline Alerre, represented the Philippines at Miss Aura International 2025 in Antalya, Türkiye, and won the international title. A year later, Baltazar returned to the same competition hoping to make it two …

Katrina Anne Johnson - Binibining Pilipinas International 2025 - feature

Katrina Anne Johnson Spent Two Years Being Told No Before Anyone Handed Her a Crown

Published by

Katrina Anne Johnson has thirteen dogs. Not adopted-on-a-whim, telegenic-puppy dogs — a mix of senior dogs, rescues from abuse and neglect, animals with special needs, one who gets around in a wheelchair. She’s a licensed pharmacist from Davao who spends her actual working hours dispensing precision, and outside of it, spends her time and money on the animals nobody else was going to take. That combination — clinical patience professionally, hard-earned patience personally — is the through-line of how she actually became a titleholder, and it’s a more interesting story than the one usually told about her. The short version most coverage runs with: Johnson won Binibining Pilipinas International 2025, becoming the first candidate from Davao to hold that specific crown, and she’s now bound for Miss International 2026 on Nov. 25 in Tokyo — one of six Filipinas carrying a national crown into an international final this year. The part that gets skipped is that this wasn’t her first attempt at the sash, and the version of her that lost the first time is …

Brown Madonna - Photo by Jhay Em Nacion

Brown Madonna Comes Home, But It Isn’t Bringing the Postcard Philippines With It

Published by

There are easier ways to introduce the Philippines to a foreign audience. You can lead with the beaches. You can lean into fiestas, hand-woven barongs, and the familiar inventory of tropical abundance and radiant Filipino hospitality, polished just enough to clear customs without raising an eyebrow. Ea Torrado’s Brown Madonna chose something considerably less tidy. Following its world premiere at the Sincerely Yours, the Philippines festival at Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt in September 2025, and a European run this June that included Berlin and Braunschweig, the full-length dance-theater work is finally returning home. It will be performed August 15 and 16 at Myra Beltran Dance Forum in Quezon City, as part of Daloy Dance Company’s 12th-anniversary season. What the work brings back across borders is not a tourist souvenir. The Altar and the Arena At its core, Brown Madonna is about the contradictory jobs Filipino women are expected to perform: mother, martyr, entertainer, saint. Torrado gets there through Catholic iconography, pop culture, labor, sexuality, class, family memory and the particular Filipino talent for putting the …

As posted by Dayao on Facebook, this photo was taken during Typhoon Ulysses in 2020. A view from a relative's second-floor window shows that the makeshift wood and rag barrier against the low wall helped protect their alley during the deluge. Years later, that makeshift fix evolved into the engineered steel gates now protecting the entire neighborhood.

How ₱5,000 Flood Gates in Cavite Keep the Water Out

Published by

The habagat has a way of making familiar places unfamiliar. In Noveleta, Cavite, the Ylang-Ylang River rises and roads turn into waterways. In Barangay San Antonio I, residents know what comes next: moving appliances, lifting mattresses, getting whatever can be saved above the waterline. During the latest flooding, the water rose to more than six feet in parts of the neighborhood. But one residential alley had a plan for it: steel gates built by the people who live there. It Started With One Gate The first wooden version appeared in 2020, when one household tried to keep floodwater from coming through its doorway. By 2023, King Nazareth Dayao Co’Arle had upgraded the design with a steel frame and rubber seals, making the barrier sturdier and tighter. What began as one household’s solution eventually became something bigger. For 2026, the goal was simple: get gates to 50 residents in the community. The funding mechanism was even simpler. Residents pooled money through a ₱5,000 ambagan, allowing more gates to be built along the residential alley. Today, the …

Filipino-Austrian Johannes Pietsch won the Eurovision Song Contest in 2025

The Philippines Is Finally Getting Its Own Eurovision

Published by

For seventy years, the Philippines has engaged in a very specific, deeply online parasocial relationship with the Eurovision Song Contest: watching from the glowing rectangle of a laptop screen while Europeans in wind machines scream about peace, love, and pyrotechnics. We never competed, of course. That never stopped us from claiming them anyway. Take 2025. Johannes Pietsch, better known to the internet as JJ, swept the Basel grand final for Austria with “Wasted Love,” a performance built around a countertenor range that could shatter fine crystal. The official scoreboard marked him down for Vienna. Twitter, however, immediately drafted him into the pantheon of proud Filipino excellence. One of ours had won the whole thing, except officially, he was waving someone else’s flag. That little loophole is about to close. On August 30, ABS-CBN is staging Pili, Pinas!, the national selection for the inaugural Eurovision Song Contest Asia. Ten entries are fighting for the country’s maiden ticket to Bangkok, where the grand final lands on November 14. The full tracks drop on August 17. For once, …

SB19 Lollapalooza 2026 senate

The Senate Has Entered the SB19 Chat

Published by

Days after SB19 took the Allianz Stage at Lollapalooza, the Philippine Senate has entered the story. Not with another performance. With paperwork. Senator Paolo Benigno “Bam” Aquino IV filed Senate Resolution No. 545 on July 31, one day after SB19 became the first Filipino act to perform at Lollapalooza. Senator Francis “Kiko” Pangilinan followed with Senate Resolution No. 573 on August 4. Both measures put the group’s Chicago appearance into the machinery of the Philippine government, where a festival set becomes something considerably more official: a matter for the legislative record.  SB19’s Lollapalooza performance was, first, a pop-culture event. It was a major American festival slot, a milestone for Filipino music, and another step in a global run that has increasingly made the group look less like a local success story and more like an export. Now it is also a Senate story. From Grant Park to the Senate Record Aquino’s resolution recognizes SB19’s Lollapalooza appearance as a significant milestone for Filipino artists and Original Pilipino Music on the global stage. Pangilinan’s resolution similarly describes …

Bea Millan-Windorski - sashed

Bea Millan-Windorski Wants the Philippines’ Fifth Crown. She Earned It at Luneta First.

Published by

On Tuesday, August 11, Bea Millan-Windorski sat for a soft-focus interview about self-care, on a stage built for someone else’s brand. It’s not the version of her that matters most. Months earlier, in late November 2025, she was standing in the crowd at Luneta Park, not on any stage, calling out government officials by name over illegal mining and deforestation she said were being allowed to slide — and that’s the story most coverage of her never got around to. The Aug. 11 event put her briefly across from Catriona Gray, the last Filipina to win Miss Universe, back in 2018 — a pairing pageant-watch accounts have been building toward for months, tracking every overlap between the two since Millan-Windorski first spoke publicly about meeting Gray and addressed the comparisons head-on rather than deflecting them. There isn’t much fresh Gray coverage to work with beyond that — she’s kept a low public profile since her own reign ended — which is part of why the pairing landed as news at all. But it’s a footnote …