Importing data absolute failure

your manifest file contains an invalid character (and possibly more).

what program did you use to make this manifest? You should try to save your file as utf-8 format... see this topic for details on troubleshooting this problem:

It looks like the dashes in these lines are not really dashes...
G423–041-CN-STR_S41_L001_R1_001.fastq
G423—042-T4-BLB_S42_L001_R1_001.fastq