February 22, 2009 (Sunday)
- Slumdog Millionaire wins eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Director for Danny Boyle. Sean Penn wins Best Actor for Milk and Kate Winslet wins Best Actress for The Reader. (The Daily Mail)
- A bomb kills one person and injures 20 others in the Khan el-Khalili souq of Cairo, Egypt. (Reuters)
- An Al-Shabaab suicide attack kills at least 11 and injures 15 more Burundian peacekeepers on an African Union military base in Mogadishu, Somalia. (BBC)
- Greek convicts Vassilis Paleokostas and Alket Rizai escape from Athens' Korydallos Prison via a helicopter. (BBC)
- Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison reopens under the new name Baghdad Central Prison. (Washington Post)
- Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyễn Tấn Dũng inaugurates the country's first oil refinery. (AFP via Google News)
- At least 73 miners die following an explosion in a coal mine in Gujiao, Shanxi, China. (Bloomberg)
- Australia holds a national day of mourning for the 209 confirmed victims of recent bushfires in Victoria. (Melbourne Herald Sun)
- The Tamil Tigers kill 10 people in Kirimetiyagara, Sri Lanka. (AFP via The Melbourne Age)
- An outbreak of hepatitis B in Gujarat, India, kills at least 38 people. (CNN)
- Somali pirates hijack Greece's MV Saldanha in the Gulf of Aden. (AFP via Google News)
- The European Council meets in Berlin, Germany, to discuss the current economic crisis. (BBC)