Bloomberg Russia has nothing to do with the energy crisis in Europe, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said, rejecting allegations from the International Energy Agency this week that it’s holding back supplies and driving up prices of natural gas. “Neither Russia nor our main exporter Gazprom have anything to do with this,” Novak told state television, according to the …

  Bloomberg Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd., which supplies almost all of South Africa’s power, will take two of the continent’s largest generating units offline this year for maintenance, increasing the risk of power cuts after the nation had record outages in 2021. The extended unavailability of the units with capacity of 920 megawatts each due to the “planned long outages …

  Bloomberg US retail sales stumbled at the end of 2021, factory output weakened and consumer sentiment deteriorated at the start of the new year, illustrating a loss of traction for the economy that many analysts view as temporary. Friday’s data deluge showed how lingering shipping challenges, supply and labor constraints, the fastest inflation in decades and the Omicron variant …