On the New York Mercantile Exchange, light, sweet crude futures for delivery in May traded at $98.31 a barrel at 0527 GMT, down $0.59 in the Globex electronic session. May Brent crude on London’s ICE Futures exchange fell $0.39 to $106.06 a barrel. Nymex WTI crude extended overnight losses, dropping below the $100 a barrel mark, as it came under pressure from a strong greenback as markets reacted to U.S. Federal Reserve commentary Thursday that interest rates could start rising in the fall. “The appreciation in the U.S. dollar has inevitably hurt overseas demand for the U.S.-denominated benchmark crudes, resulting in downward pressure,” analyst Tan Chee Tat at Phillips Futures said. President Barack Obama ordered a second round of sanctions Thursday on 20 Russians and a St. Petersburg bank, and Russia responded with its own list of punitive measures against six U.S. lawmakers and three White House officials. European […]