Parsing RSS output from Percussion

What would be the easiest way to read the XML data that percussion rss buttons ouput into a list? I’m wanting to include the lastest five items off of two RSS feeds.

The layout on my front page has 5 tabs and on one tab I want to have the latest 5 news articles and 5 calendar events.

What would be the best way to read them into a list. I have tried multiple JS/AJAX commands but they don’t seem to read the percussion rss output. I have tried them with other rss feeds and they work.