August 5, 2020 - PBS NewsHour full episode

Lebanon’s capital city is suffering the aftermath of a cataclysmic explosion that killed at least 135 people and injured 5,000. On Tuesday, a fire started at Beirut’s port -- followed by a detonation so powerful it sent a shockwave through the entire city. Hospitals already overwhelmed with coronavirus patients were flooded with bloodied bodies. Special correspondent Jane Ferguson reports.

In our news wrap Wednesday, a former U.S. deputy attorney general denied that former President Obama and Vice President Biden tried to influence a probe of the 2016 Trump campaign. At a Senate hearing, Sally Yates said former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn aimed to neutralize sanctions against Russia. Also, reports from South Korea say deadly explosions occurred in North Korea on Monday.

The planned summer conventions of both parties have been reduced and reimagined due to the coronavirus pandemic, rendering this election year different from any other. And of course millions of American lives have been upended due to COVID-19 and the recession. The Washington Post’s Gary Abernathy and freelance journalist Sarah Smarsh join Judy Woodruff to discuss what U.S. voters are thinking.

Stuart Stevens is one of the Republican Party’s most successful campaign strategists, with a career spanning decades. In his revealing new book, “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump,” Stevens admits the GOP uses race as an issue to divide Americans and win elections -- and says the party has abandoned its principles in the Trump era. He joins Judy Woodruff to discuss.

On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped the first atomic weapon on Hiroshima, Japan. Seventy-five years later, the NewsHour revisits how the president became the sole authority on when nuclear weapons are used. Nick Schifrin reports and talks to former Secretary of Defense William Perry, co-author of "The Button: The New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power from Truman to Trump."

The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May prompted calls to change the policing structure there. On Wednesday night, the city’s charter commission will decide whether to ask voters to begin the process of abolishing the police force -- and to clarify what would replace it. Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports.

Throughout the pandemic, Americans in elder care facilities have been at a high risk of contracting COVID-19. But there are also those residents of nursing homes who have survived the disease in spite of their age. Centenarian Grace Weissman-Spiegel-Davis is one of those. She shares her Brief But Spectacular take on her spectacular, but not brief, life.

Racism, both past and present, remains at the forefront of the American national conversation. Now, a new book by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist examines how hierarchy and class are substantially intertwined with race in America. Jeffrey Brown talks to Isabel Wilkerson, author of “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent,” as part of our ongoing coverage of arts and culture, Canvas.

American businesses suffering through the pandemic’s economic fallout have received hundreds of billions of dollars in federal loans since the Paycheck Protection Program opened this spring. But accessing that funding was challenging for business owners with criminal records. Economics correspondent Paul Solman reports as part of our new series, Searching for Justice.