Ref almost down for the count

46-year-old Ricardo Portillo, a longtime Utah soccer referee, is in a coma after being punched by a teenage player unhappy with one of his calls during a weekend game, and his family says they're hoping for the man's miraculous recovery and want justice for him. Portillo has swelling in his brain and his recovery is uncertain as he remains in critical condition, Dr. Shawn Smith said yesterday at the Intermountain Medical Center in the Salt Lake City suburb of Murray. Police say a 17-year-old player in a recreational soccer league punched Portillo after the man called a foul on him and issued him a yellow card. The teen has been booked into juvenile detention on suspicion of aggravated assault. Those charges could be amplified if Portillo dies. The attack on Saturday wasn't the first time Portillo has been assaulted by an angry player while refereeing. Five years ago, a player upset with a call broke his ribs. A few years before that, a player broke his leg. But enough about that because we have another punching incident to mention here. A lawmaker from Greece’s extreme-right Golden Dawn party allegedly tried to punch the mayor of Athens yesterday, swinging at him but reportedly missing and hitting a 12-year-old girl instead. The confrontation came hours after police used pepper spray to prevent the nationalist party from distributing free food – only to Greek citizens – in the city’s main Syntagma Square in defiance of a municipal ban the mayor had vowed to uphold. Seriously, why should this incident be escalated by punching a kid in the forehead? He should go to jail for his stupidity. Extreme actions, especially when their victims are innocent 12-year-old children, do not befit that or any other democracy, and neither does the fact that gunmen have shot dead the prosecutor investigating the murder of Pakistan's ex-leader Benazir Bhutto. The attackers shot Chaudhry Zulfiqar Ali as he drove to a court hearing in the case. He lost control of his car, which hit and killed a pedestrian. But back to the punches, this time it's a blue jay and a gumball machine: