http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/12/obamas_new_nationalism_more_sukarno_than_teddy_roosevelt.html
That Lolo was a well-connected young Indonesian student, firmly entrenched in the fabric of the Indonesian ruling class, is supported by several facts.
Lolo’s mother was closely related to Sultan Hamenkubuwono IX, the hereditary ruler of Yogyakarta. From 1949 until his death in1988, the sultan was a towering figure of civilian influence within first the Sukarno, and later the Suharto government. He served as the national minister of Foreign Affairs under Sukarno, and from 1973 to 1978, he was also Suharto’s vice president.
Mayo Soetoro-Ng, Obama’s half sister, has publicly mentioned her grandmother’s “royal blood,” and University of Hawaii anthropology professor Alice Dewey, Stanley Ann Dunham’s close friend and thesis adviser, told me in a phone interview last year1 that:
Lolo’s mother, Ann, and Maya lived inside the royal area of Yogyokarta when I visited them in 1978-1979. She was related to the Sultan, I think probably at the second-cousin level or maybe even the first-cousin level. They — Ann, her daughter Maya, and her mother-in-law— lived in a house very near the center of that walled area, which suggested to me that she had a fairly close family relationship to the sultan. The betang is traditionally the area reserved for the extended royal family of the Sultan Hamengkubuwono. No one who was a foreigner without royal blood could live there.
Soetoro’s familial relations to the Sultan would explain why he received a scholarship to the University of Hawaii East-West Center program. Typically, foreign governments recommend students who have some sort of political connection.
http://blogs.thehindu.com/delhi/?p=5630
Corroborating “testimony” from one of her friends in Indonesia:
“After her divorce she married Lolo Soetoro, who was a royal from Central Java. They had a daughter, Maya. Barack and Maya were raised in a traditional royal environment in Jog-jakarta.”