WASHINGTON — A closely watched Alzheimer’s drug from Eli Lilly won the backing of federal health advisers on Monday, setting the stage for the treatment’s expected approval for people with mild dementia caused by the brain-robbing disease.

Food and Drug Administration advisers voted unanimously that the drug’s ability to slow the disease outweighs its risks, including side effects like brain swelling and bleeding that will have to be monitored.

“I thought the evidence was very strong in the trial showing the effectiveness of the drug,” said panel member Dean Follmann, a National Institutes of Health statistician.

The FDA will make the final decision on approval later this year. If the agency agrees with the panel’s recommendation, the drug, donanemab, would only be the second Alzheimer’s drug cleared in the U.S. that’s been shown to convincingly slow cognitive decline and memory problems due to Alzheimer’s. The FDA approved a similar infused drug, Leqembi, from Japanese drugmaker Eisai last year.

The slowdown seen with both drugs amounts to several months and experts disagree on whether patients or their loved ones will be able to detect the difference.

But Lilly’s approach to studying its once-a-month treatment prompted questions from FDA reviewers.

Patients in the company’s study were grouped based on their levels of a brain protein, called tau, that predicts severity of cognitive problems. That led FDA to question whether patients might need to be screened via brain scans for tau before getting the drug. But most panelists thought there was enough evidence of the drug’s benefit to prescribe it broadly, without screening for the protein.

The FDA had been widely expected to approve Lilly’s drug in March. But instead the agency said it would ask its panel of neurology experts to publicly review the company’s data, an unexpected delay that surprised analysts and investors.

Menendez trial: A New Jersey businessman who prosecutors say bribed Sen. Bob Menendez testified Monday that the Democrat told him in summer 2019 that he’d look into a state criminal probe threatening his business and later assured him there was no threat and boasted about saving him.

At the time, Jose Uribe said in Manhattan federal court, he assumed that Menendez knew he had made a $15,000 down payment and was making monthly payments on a Mercedes-Benz for Menendez’s girlfriend, now his wife. Prosecutors contend that the car, along with gold bars and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash found in the couple’s Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, home, were bribes paid by three businessmen, including Uribe, to get the senator to use his influence to serve their purposes and earn them money from 2018 to 2023.

Defense lawyers for Menendez have argued that the meeting with Uribe and other evidence cited by prosecutors is nothing more than a senator meeting with constituents and doing what he can to help his state in his role as one of its representatives in Congress.

Menendez, 70, has resisted calls to step down as New Jersey’s senior senator.

Korean discord: South Korea’s military on Monday said it’s detecting signs that North Korea is installing its own loudspeakers along their heavily armed border, a day after the South blared anti-Pyongyang propaganda broadcasts over its speakers for the first time in years as the rivals engage in a Cold War-style psychological warfare.

The South’s resumption of its loudspeaker broadcasts on Sunday was in retaliation for the North sending over 1,000 balloons filled with trash and manure over the last couple of weeks. North Korea has described its balloon campaign as a response to South Korean civilian groups using balloons to fly anti-North Korean propaganda leaflets across the border. Pyongyang has condemned such activities as it’s extremely sensitive to any outside criticism of leader Kim Jong Un’s authoritarian rule.

The tit-for-tat over speakers and balloons has deepened tensions between the Koreas as talks over the North’s nuclear ambitions remain stalled.

Sudan in crisis: The number of internally displaced people in Sudan has reached more than 10 million as war drives about a quarter of the population from their homes, the U.N. migration agency told The Associated Press on Monday.

More than 2 million other people have been driven abroad, mostly to neighboring Chad, South Sudan and Egypt, International Organization for Migration spokesman Mohammedali Abunajela said. The IOM said the internally displaced include 2.8 million who fled their homes before the current war began.

Sudan’s latest conflict began in April last year when soaring tensions between the leaders of the military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces exploded into open fighting in the capital, Khartoum, and elsewhere in the country. The war has wrecked Sudan, killing more than 14,000 people and wounding thousands, while pushing its population to the brink of famine.

Iowa immigration law: Iowa defended its new immigration law on Monday and argued that the state’s ability to file criminal charges against people did not infringe on federal authority over immigration because local officials would abide by all federal regulations.

Lawyers for the U.S. Department of Justice and a coalition of civil rights groups are seeking a temporary or permanent injunction of the law, which goes into effect July 1 unless it’s blocked by the courts. The law is similar to one in Texas, which has been temporarily blocked, and another in Oklahoma that the DOJ is seeking to stop.

U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Locher said “I’ll do my best” to rule quickly on the injunction request.

The Iowa law would allow criminal charges to be brought against people who have outstanding deportation orders or who previously have been removed from or denied admission to the U.S. Once in custody, migrants could either agree to a judge’s order to leave the U.S. or be prosecuted, potentially facing time in prison before deportation.

Death penalty case: Missouri Gov. Mike Parson on Monday turned down a clemency request for inmate David Hosier, a move that likely clears the way for his execution.

Hosier, 69, faces lethal injection Tuesday for the 2009 deaths of a Jefferson City couple, Angela and Rodney Gilpin. Randy Dampf, a Jefferson City police officer at the time of the killings and now an investigator for the county prosecutor, said Hosier had a romantic relationship with Angela Gilpin and was angry with her for breaking it off.

Larry Komp, a federal public defender and one of Hosier’s attorneys, said no court appeals are pending.