Closed Aspherical Manifolds with Center
  We show that in all dimensions >7 there are closed aspherical manifolds whose fundamental groups have nontrivial center but do not possess any topological circle actions. This disproves a conjectured converse (proposed by Conner and Raymond) to a classical theorem of Borel. 
Sylvain Cappell, Shmuel Weinberger, Min Yan
math.GT