Surgery on SL~×En\widetilde{\Bbb{SL}}\times\Bbb{E}^n-manifolds

We show that although closed $\widetilde{\Bbb{SL}}\times\Bbb{E}^n$-manifolds do not admit metrics of nonpositive sectional curvature, the arguments of Farrell and Jones can be extended to show that such manifolds are topologically rigid, if $n\geq2$.Comment: 7 pages, AMS-LaTeX file, To appear in the Canadian Mathematical Bulletin

Seifert fibred knot manifolds

We consider the question of when is the closed manifold obtained by elementary surgery on an $n$-knot Seifert fibred over a 2-orbifold. After some observations on the classical case, we concentrate on the cases n=2 and 3. We have found a new family of 2-knots with torsion-free, solvable group, overlooked in earlier work. We know of no higher dimensional examples.Comment: New co-author, stronger restrictions on possible Seifert bases. Final section on 3-knots reduced to a paragraph, as a lemma was misused in the original version. Version 3; minor improvements to first paragraph and notatio