PR is very outdated and lately it is causing lot of issues to Google: link sales, PR maniacs and so on.
A sudden removal of PR will cause some panic and issues to many applications and sites that use PR queries for various tasks.
So Google is probably removing PR gradually. They don’t update for a very long period, so webmasters learn how to live without it.

There are more than 7 months since the last update.
Usually Pagerank was updating every 3 months.
Is Google doing some major changes with the Page Rank?

After Google decided to close down google.cn, China’s top Internet search firm Baidu Inc seems to be the first winner. Gradually Google’s Chinese traffic splits between Baidu and google.com.hk. It’s still a miracle how a huge company such as Google, prefers to lose money in order to avoid the self-censorship demanded by China. What could have changed their mind, considering that first they agreed and cooperated with Beijing?