Just read news from www.smh.com.au about Obama and found this word. Looks so similar to influence. It means:

(河流的)汇合处, 汇流处, 交汇处

(事物的)汇合, 会聚, 汇集

” What impossibly strange confluence of circumstance led to this moment, when a junior senator from Illinois, a man with a spindly public record leavened with a gift for oratory from God, stood in front of a quarter of a million hysterical people in his own home town and claimed his country’s highest honour? “