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Baghdad: Four students aged between 13 and 15 were killed and 18 people were wounded in a Shi'ite district of Baghdad on Monday when a bomb planted in a school yard exploded, police saidThe death toll from the explosion in Baghdad's Sadr City could increase, police officials said.

Overall violence in Iraq has fallen dramatically over the past 18 months. Civilian deaths last month, at 88, fell to their lowest level since the 2003 US invasion, according to government figures.

A bomb at a busy market in Sadr City, an impoverished area that is seen as a stronghold of Shi'ite militants, killed 72 people and wounded 127 in June.

It has been years since Saddam Hussein has been mentioned on television but an Iraqi television station has been airing ads showing an image of Hussein with the slogan "raise your sword."
An unknown television channel, which praised former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, was dropped off the airwaves on Monday after it began broadcasting across Iraq for three days, according to Press TV. However, the Chairman of Al-Lafeta TV has said it will return to the airwaves this weekend so it can make technological upgrades.
The Associated Press reports Muhammad Jarboua, Chairman of the television channel, has denied that the Ba’athists have provided funding to the channel. He has also denied that it’s a political tool for the Ba’ath political party but he makes it quite secretive of where the station is located and where their major source of funding originates.
State of Law Coalition, led by current incumbent Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, issued a statement on the website, “This Ba'athist channel said goodbye [within] days of its starting. We salute our national government if it participated to close this channel.”
However, as the Guardian notes, Jarboua, an Algerian businessman, has said that they’re just making upgrades and nothing has shutdown, “We're opting for a more advanced technology and we asked for the broadcast to be cut in the meantime for four days.”
The television station was originally going to be named “Saddam Hussein” but was changed due to political pressure.
Iraq’s former Vice-President Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri praised the move and feels it’s a response against Ba’ath leaders. The Iraqi government has not made any public comments regarding the station.

Fifteen Iraqi soldiers have been killed as they transported confiscated bombs to a disposal area, officials say.
The accident happened in northern Iraq, when one bomb exploded, igniting the other weapons and bombs, killing the soldiers on the truck.
They were driving to a vacant area in Bashika, east of Mosul.
The Iraqi army frequently undertakes controlled explosions in the area to dispose of confiscated weapons away from residential areas.
Mosul is one of the few remaining Iraqi cities where there is still routine insurgent violence.
On Thursday, a soldier and three policemen were shot dead.
Nationally, violence in Iraq saw a spike in August, with the highest number of violent deaths for more than a year.
Iraqi government figures showed that 393 civilians were killed that month, along with about 60 police officers and soldiers.

Three blasts have rocked the Iraqi city of Ramadi, west of Baghdad, killing at least 22 people and wounding 61, police have told the BBC.
A car packed with explosives ploughed into a concrete wall at the police headquarters. A motorcycle bomb then went off among the crowd that gathered.
The third blast, an apparent car bomb, went off outside the main hospital.
A curfew has been imposed in Ramadi, capital of Anbar province, which was once a centre of the Sunni insurgency.
Eyewitness Musaab Ali Mohammed said he was buying cigarettes near the police headquarters when he heard a big explosion.
"I saw police cars and firefighters, and they started to carry out the wounded and dead. Minutes later, a second explosion took place," he told the Associated Press news agency.
"After that, policemen started to fire in the air and called upon civilians to leave, fearing a third blast," the eyewitness added.
Anbar has been relatively stable since Sunni fighters turned against al-Qaeda and joined forces with the US and Iraqi security forces.
But recent weeks have seen a series of attacks on police and Iraqi army checkpoints in Anbar.
On Tuesday, a car bomb killed at least nine people in a market in Falluja. A day earlier, a suicide bomber killed six mourners at a funeral in Haditha.
The dead and injured in the latest attacks include both police and civilians.