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"Oh, I checked every place in town, and they were outrageous," Shannon Kelly said. "It would be anywhere from four to five hundred, and I just don't have that right now."

Kelly had just walked into Rent N Roll, a rent-to-own tire store in Ocala, Florida. She was looking to rent a set of tires for her truck. Tire rental stores like this one have been around for a while, but until recently, most of their customers rented fancy rims. These days, it's becoming more common for the stores to rent simple tires to people who don't have the cash to buy tires outright.

Customers like Kelly can walk out of the store with a new set of tires for about $30 — and a promise to make lots more payments in the future. In the long run, some renters wind up paying twice as much for their tires as they would have paid if they'd bought them outright.

Lots of factors have driven more people to rent tires. Tighter credit means fewer people using credit cards to buy tires. Stagnant wages and high unemployment make hard for many people to come up with enough cash to buy new tires. The price of rubber went up a while ago.

And, in 2009, the U.S. imposed a tariff on Chinese tires as part of a trade fight. That drove up the price not only of imported Chinese tires, but also of other tires, which no longer had to compete with the cheap Chinese imports. By the time the tariff was removed last October, the price of imported tires had risen roughly 40 percent. And that rippled all through the tire market.

Even if tire prices start to come back down, the tire rental business isn't going anywhere.

"I understand that I'll probably end up paying a lot," says Lyn Warren, a manager at McDonald's, who just signed up to rent brand new tires for his 2000 Honda. "But right now, I need the tires."

The quintessential American superhero — the one who forged the genre — returns to the multiplex this weekend: Superman. The latest big-screen iteration, called Man of Steel, explores the birth of the character (played as an adult by British actor Henry Cavill), delving into why he came to Earth, into his inner conflicts growing up, and into how he resolves them.

And more than perhaps any other big-screen version of the story, Man of Steel lingers on the wrenching death throes of Superman's homeworld — the distant planet Krypton, where his natural father (Russell Crowe) and mother work desperately not just to save their son, but to save their species.

"I have a reverence for that mythology," says director Zack Snyder, who admits to being "a slight dork" about such things. "And I really wanted to treat the experience of seeing Superman born [with care]. ... And that ancient technology ... I find fun to think about. ... Within that world, it was fun to see Jor-El putting his son into the basket and [metaphorically] sending him down the river."

Snyder joined NPR's Linda Wertheimer to talk casting choices, cutting the film down to size, and why this version of the character doesn't wear his shorts on the outside.

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There's no single reason for the decline of bees, suggests More Than Honey director Markus Imhoof, whose family has kept the honey-producing apians for generations. The filmmaker hails from the Swiss Alps, where flowers, fruit, honey and bees exist in synchrony, with only low-tech human intervention. Even there, however, diseases and parasites are devastating hives.

Things are worse in China, where Mao's war on birds shattered the natural order, and in the U.S., where industrial-scale beekeeping and the indiscriminate use of pesticides has fueled the phenomenon known as "colony collapse."

The film's first stop is California, which produces as much as 90 percent of the world's almonds. The trees require the ministrations of untold numbers of bees, whose hives are trucked to the orchards by the hundreds on huge flatbeds, by companies whose insects also pollinate other crops throughout the country. The stresses of travel kill bees, sometimes by the millions. Fungicides and varroa mites also undermine colony health.

Imhoof's visit to China is brief, probably because bad news about its food supply is not encouraged by that nation's censors. Then it's off to Australia, the only continent whose bees have not been infested by the varroa mite. There, bee researchers (including the director's daughter) are working on a disease-resistant breed. The last stop is Arizona, where one honey harvester believes that the hardier Africanized (aka "killer") bee is American agriculture's great yellow-and-black hope.

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Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued a strong warning to the protesters camped out at Taksim Square in Istanbul.

He said that within 24 hours, the situation at the square would be resolved. As The New York Times reports, the tough talk was tempered with an olive branch of sorts: Erdogan hinted that a referendum could decide whether a mall would be built in place of a park next to the square.

As we've reported, a small peaceful protest against the redevelopment kicked off the largest anti-government protests in recent memory.

The Times adds:

"'We have not responded to punches with punches. From now on security forces will respond differently,' Mr. Erdogan said on Wednesday. 'This issue will be over in 24 hours.'

"Mr. Erdogan reiterated and sharpened that warning in a speech on Thursday morning.

"'Using a Molotov cocktail is a crime, burning and destroying is a crime, destroying public order is a crime,' he said in his televised statement, in reference to protesters who set barriers around Gezi Park to block police interference. 'These cannot be called a struggle for freedom, struggle for rights.'"