India, June 18 -- Juneteenth is being observed in the middle of a workweek this time, impacting several government offices around the US. Officially recognised as a federal holiday in the country since 2021, Juneteenth is also known as America's Second Independence Day.

Juneteenth is celebrated every year on June 19. This year, the date falls on a Thursday. It honours the day Major General Gordon Granger visited Galveston Bay in Texas in 1865. Joined by 2,000 Union troops, he arrived in the region to proclaim that over 250,000 enslaved Black people there were free. This happened nearly two and a half years after the (then) US President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863.

The executive order from Linc...