As the Rio+20 Earth Summit — the largest U.N. conference ever — ends in disappointment, we’re joined by the leading Canadian scientist, environmentalist and broadcaster, David Suzuki. As host of the long-running CBC program, “The Nature of Things,” seen in more than 40 countries, Suzuki has helped educate millions about the rich biodiversity of the planet and the threats it faces from human-driven global warming. In 1990 he co-founded the David Suzuki Foundation, which focuses on sustainable ecology, and in 2009 he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award. Suzuki joins us from the summit in Rio de Janeiro to talk about the climate crisis, the student protests in Quebec, his childhood growing up in an internment camp, and his daughter Severn’s historic speech at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 when she was 12 years old. “If we don’t see that we are utterly embedded in the natural world and dependent on … Mother Nature for our very well-being and survival … then our priorities will continue to be driven by man-made constructs like national borders, economies, corporations, markets,” Suzuki says. “Those are all human-created things. They shouldn’t dominate the way we live. It should be the biosphere. And the leaders in that should be indigenous people, who still have that sense, that the earth is truly our mother, that it gives birth to us. You don’t treat your mother the way we treat the planet or the biosphere today.” [includes rush transcript]

Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo has been ousted in what he has described as a parliamentary coup. On Friday, the Paraguayan Senate voted 39-to-4 to impeach Lugo, saying he had failed in his duty to maintain social order following a recent land dispute which resulted in the deaths of six police officers and 11 peasant farmers. A former priest, Lugo was once called the “Bishop of the Poor” and was known for defending peasant rights. Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Chile and Uruguay have all condemned Lugo’s ouster, but the question remains whether the Obama administration will recognize the new government. We’re joined by Greg Grandin, professor of Latin American history at New York University and author of “Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism.” His most recent book, “Fordlandia,” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. [includes rush transcript]

The 2012 presidential election is set to become the most expensive race in history, with spending projected to top $11 billion — more than double the 2008 total. It will be the first presidential election since the Supreme Court’s landmark Citizens United decision, which lifted a 63-year-old ban prohibiting corporations, trade associations and unions from spending unlimited amounts of money on political advocacy. We’re joined by reporter Andy Kroll and editor Monika Bauerlein of Mother Jones magazine, whose new cover story is “Follow the Dark Money.” The article warns: “Super-PACs, seven-figure checks, billionaire bankrollers, shadowy nonprofits: This is the state of play in what will be the first presidential election since Watergate to be fully privately funded.” “Click here”:http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2012/6/22/wanna_buy_an_election_mother_jones_expose_on_dark_money_citizens_united to watch Part 2 of the interview.[includes rush transcript]

In a rare interview, former Texas death row prisoner Anthony Graves joins us to recount his experience in solitary confinement and how he was fully exonerated and released from prison in 2010. Graves was convicted in 1994 of assisting Robert Carter, a man he barely knew, in the brutal murders of six people. There was no physical evidence linking Graves to the crime, and his conviction relied primarily on Carter’s testimony. Before he was executed, Carter twice admitted he had lied about Graves’s involvement in the crime. In 2006, an appeals court overturned Graves’s conviction and ordered a new trial, saying prosecutors had elicited false statements and withheld testimony. After 18 years in prison, most of them on death row, Graves was exonerated and reunited with his family after a special prosecutor concluded he was an innocent man. Graves is now an active member of the movement to abolish the death penalty. “My experience was hell,” Graves says. “I always liken it to something that you would consider to be your worst nightmare. I had to go through that experience every day for 18-and-a-half years. And it was just no way to live.” Urging an end to the death penalty, Graves says: “They’re killing in your name. And I say to you, stand up and tell these people, ‘Not in my name anymore.’” [includes rush transcript]

In the first-ever hearing of its kind, a Senate panel heard testimony this week on the psychological and human rights implications of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons. While defenders of solitary confinement claim it is needed to control the most violent prisoners, many of the people called to testify at the hearing described how it can cause intense suffering and mental illness. We’re joined by Anthony Graves, a former Texas prisoner who was fully exonerated of a murder conviction after spending 18 years behind bars, the bulk of that time on death row and in solitary confinement, and by James Ridgeway, a veteran journalist and co-editor of Solitary Watch, a website that tracks solitary confinement and torture in American prisons. [includes rush transcript]

In 1992, 12-year-old Severn Cullis-Suzuki became known as “the girl who silenced the world for six minutes” after she addressed delegates in Rio de Janeiro during the summit’s plenary session. We air Cullis-Suzuki’s historic address and speak to her from the Rio+20 summit, which she comes back to now as a veteran international environmental campaigner and mother of two. “Twenty years later, the world is still talking about a speech, a six-minute speech that a 12-year-old gave to world leaders,” Cullis-Suzuki says. “Why? It is because the world is hungry to hear the truth, and it is nowhere articulated as well as from the mouths of those with everything at stake, which is youth.” [includes rush transcript]

We’re joined from the Rio+20 Earth Summit in Rio by Nnimmo Bassey, executive director of Environmental Rights Action in Nigeria, chair of Friends of the Earth International. “The leaders came to Rio with, clearly, very low ambitions, and probably with the desire to block agreements on any issue that would not be of particular benefit to them or their countries,” Bassey says. “They’ve come out with a draft agreement which the presidents are looking at currently, a draft agreement that is shallow, that is hollow, that doesn’t describe or deal with the root causes of the crisis, the multiple crises that the world is confronted with right now.” [includes rush transcript]

On Wednesday, 17-year-old environmental activist Brittany Trilford of Wellington, New Zealand, addressed more than a hundred heads of state at the opening plenary of the Rio+20 U.N. Earth Summit, the largest United Nations gathering ever. “We are all aware that time is ticking, and we are quickly running out,” Trilford said. “You have 72 hours to decide the fate of your children, my children, my children’s children. And I start the clock now.” [includes rush transcript]

Leaders from more than 100 countries are meeting today in Brazil for the start of the Rio+20 Earth Summit, the largest United Nations conference ever. The conference comes 20 years after the U.N. Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro pledged to prot…

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has taken refuge in Ecuador’s embassy in London and asked for asylum. Assange made the move Tuesday in a last-ditch bid to avoid extradition to Sweden over sex crime accusations. Earlier today, police in London announced Assange is now subject to arrest because his decision to spend the night at the Ecuadorian embassy violated the conditions of his bail. Assange is seeking asylum because he fears extradition to Sweden may lead to his transfer to the United States, where he could potentially face charges relating to WikiLeaks. “In my view, it is a situation of political persecution of Julian Assange for his political activities,” says Michael Ratner, a member of Assange’s legal team. “It does fit within the asylum application procedure under the Declaration of Human Rights.” In an apparent reference to the United States, an Ecuadorian official said Assange fears being extradited “to a country where espionage and treason are punished with the death penalty.” [includes rush transcript]

Sharif Abdel Kouddous reports from Egypt on the country’s growing political crisis. Former President Hosni Mubarak is on life support, both candidates claim to have won last weekend’s election, and the ruling military council has seized greater power. Official presidential election results are not expected to be announced until Thursday. Tens of thousands of Egyptians protested Tuesday night in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in a rally called by the Muslim Brotherhood, expressing outrage over the army’s decree late Sunday that it would seize all legislative powers. “Right now the country has no constitution, no parliament, and an incoming president that will have scant power,” Kouddous says. “So, really, the military council is controlling the key branches of state. … [It's] perhaps a fitting end to this nonsensical transition that we’ve seen over the last 16 months.” [includes rush transcript]

At the march opposing the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy in New York City, Joyce Williams, a Bronx great-grandmother, victimized in a stop-and-frisk incident, says she had money taken from her when he was stopped by police last year: “If they’re stealing from great-grandmothers, they’re stealing from these young kids, also,” Williams says. We also speak with organizer and activist Thenjiwe McHarris. “Young people of color … cannot walk down the street without being profiled,” McHarris says. “It’s not just [police] stopping them, asking them questions, but they’re stopping them and they’re communicating a very powerful message to them, which is: ‘You are black. You are brown. You are a person of color. You are in a city where you live. And there is something really wrong with you.’ And that hurts.” [includes rush transcript]

J.D. Williams, an actor who played drug dealer Preston “Bodie” Broadus on the hit HBO series, “The Wire,” took part in Sunday’s New York City march against the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy. “It’s a sad thing that it becomes kind of natural with young black men,” Williams says. “It kind of becomes second nature with us, in a way where we expect to be stopped or we expect to be bothered or we expect to be harassed.” [includes rush transcript]