BERN, June 4 (Reuters) - Players may be at an increased risk of injury as professional sports rush back into action following the coronavirus stoppage, a global union representing 85,000 athletes said on Thursday.

WPA executive director Brendan Schwab pointed to a study conducted by Australian sports scientist Joel Mason last month which suggested an increased injury rate in the Bundesliga since Germany's professional soccer league restarted on May 16.

As alleged in some reports, he had been arrested by police in 1991-92 for supplying weapons to Maoists along the Andhra Pradesh-Odisha border. Sport hunter Khan has been a controversial figure with his penchant for wild animals and guns.

The WPA said that one key measure would be to reduce the strain by modifying rest periods, substitutions and duration of matches, as soccer had done by allowing five substitutions per team instead of three.

The chairman of UK Athletics said last week the Olympics should be called off to spare athletes the stress of trying to train in the grip of a pandemic which has killed around 12,000 people since the virus surfaced in China.

"Many players will not have had access to the necessary training methods to ensure that they have the necessary fitness and conditioning to compete," said the World Players' Association (WPA), whose members play in the NBA, MLB, NHL, NFL, European soccer and Australian Rules football, among others.

Other key concerns were whether players had been provided with enough time to return to competition fitness and whether, in the case of injury, they would have access to the usual range of treatment and rehabilitation, given the strain on health services.

Suggesting a year's delay, he said the IOC was experienced in dealing with obstacles, citing the cancellations in 1916, 1940 and 1944 because of World Wars and the political boycotts of the Games in Moscow in 1980 and Los Angeles in 1984.

"Given the highly unresolved situation in Norway and in large parts of the world, it is neither justifiable or desirable to send Norwegian athletes to the Olympics or Paralympics in Tokyo until the world community has put this pandemic behind them," sports president Berit Kjøll said.

The Maharashtra Forest Department has recently been investigating the surprise seizure of the marine molluscs, which have a hard, protective outer case, and are found scattered across sea shores in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa and Karnataka.

Track and field is the most important sport for NBC so the prospect of the US team being reluctant to attend, or insisting that they could not be competitive because of disruption to preparation, means that pressure is becoming unbearable on Toyko 2020 organisers and Bach to postpone the games, despite the huge costs.

This decrypts witless 'packets' which are essentially shipments of data from a device to a router that are broken up into smaller parts and then reassembled at their destination. Those packets could contain anything from an email to an IP address and more. 

Mumbai-based activist, Dr Sarita Subramaniam, asked: 'Why can't a state like Maharashtra, which is rich in wildlife, have a trained team of veterinarians that can tranquilise a big cat in the wild. They could have rescued it and kept it in a rescue centre.' 

"The IOC needs to elevate its dialogue with the full range of those most affected beyond sponsors and governments to an open multi-stakeholder process that brings to the table as equals player associations as the representatives of athletes and others most at risk," WPA executive director Brendan Schwab said in a statement.

The Sport and Rights Alliance (SRA) and the World Players Association (WPA) said a "deep review and broader consultation" with athletes was required regarding the decision over whether the Games could run as planned.

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The intervention from the governing body for athletics in the US, which combines the blue riband sport of the Olympic Games and the richest nation, means that the efforts of IOC President Thomas Bach to persist in staging the games now appear to be in tatters.

Norway's Sports Federation and Olympic and Paralympic Committee (NIF) said it had written to IOC chief Thomas Bach calling for the Games to be postponed, even if the pandemic is under control in Japan by the summer.

Maharashtra forest officials, Hyderabadi shooter Nawab Shafath Ali Khan and Chalisgaon MLA Unmesh Patil have found themselves under fire from wildlife conservationists after a photo of them cheerfully posing alongside the 'dangerous' leopard they killed on Saturday night emerged.

'This results in scenarios where client devices that are unaffected (either patched or using different Wi-Fi chips not vulnerable to Kr00k) can be connected to an access point (often times beyond an individual's control) that is vulnerable,' researchers wrote in a research paper.