SEOtop10 - 1:45 pm on Oct 27, 2003 (gmt 0)

Outbound text links with relevant keyword-rich anchor text and if possible, keyword rich outbound URL helps you a lot in the SERPs. It is one of the prime SEO techniques I use.

It does not leak your PR. Your PR is totally dependent on the incoming links to the page. It does reduce the amount of PR that you can recirculate to your other pages and sites.

I have not seen any evidence of the PR or quality of the target page affecting the ranking of the current page. However I do find it quite funny that many sites link to Google.com even when it is not relevant to the page in the expectation that google will favor them for this :-)