There has to be a simple answer to this, but I have yet to find it

I have a top level site, on which I place company announcements. Below that site are the team sites for each department, with their own individual announcements. I need to display the announcements from the top level site on each subsite.
Sounds easy, eh The Announcements webpart allows for an RSS feed output, right
I have tried the RSS webpart - it will not pull data in from authenticated feeds.
I have tried the XML webpart - it simply displays the error 'Cannot retrieve the URL specified in the XML Link property. For more assistance, contact your site administrator.' and it would seem that, while a common error, no one has publically stated a solution for it.
The user I am using on both sites is a farm administrator, so user permissions dont seem likely.
Has anyone solved this
Regards
Richard