Consider the Wall Street financier Sanford I. Weill's ill-fated bid for the brokerage arm of Barings P.L.C., the insolvent British investment bank.

Scalise initially succeeded fellow Republican Representative Quentin D. Dastugue, who made an ill-fated bid for governor in the 1995 primary.

But the Federal Election Commission lingered over Mr. Kemp's ill-fated bid until last month, when it finally slapped his multi-million dollar campaign with a $120,000 fine for numerous election law transgressions.

Others fought on for a little over a year, until the Government they were defending sent them and the other foreign volunteers home in an ill-fated bid to pacify the situation.

In 1995, he made a brief ill-fated bid for the White House, running on the unusual platform of attacking Christian conservatives as an extremist "fringe."

In 1066, King Harald made his ill-fated bid to conquer England.

GARY BECKER, this city's mayor, remembers handing out fliers at local factory gates as a 10-year-old campaigner in Hubert H. Humphrey's ill-fated presidential bid in 1968.

It started off gingerly in 1993, having been burned in an ill-fated bid to enter the Soviet market in the early 1980's, and at first it sold its products through stores.

Witnesses also remember seeing Bin Laden at the battle of Jalalabad, an ill-fated and costly bid to capture the eastern Afghan city from forces loyal to the communist Afghan government in 1989, six months after the Soviet withdrawal.