This seems to fix it, though is a bit slow, having to load up LWP::UserAgent to do the work:

   use strict;
   use warnings;
   use XML::RSS::Tools;
   use LWP::UserAgent;

   my $rss_feed = XML::RSS::Tools->new;

   my $ua          = LWP::UserAgent->new;
   $ua->agent('Camel Power 3.14.15 [rss])');
   my $rss         = "http://www.perl.com/pace/news.rss";

   my $request     = HTTP::Request->new(GET => $rss);
   my $response    = $ua->request($request);
   my $status      = $response->status_line;

   my %errors = ('500'=>'Bad hostname supplied',
                 '501'=>'Protocol not supported',
                 '404'=>'URL not found',
                 '403'=>'URL forbidden',
                 '401'=>'Authorization failed',
                 '400'=>'Bad request found',
                 '302'=>'Redirected URL'
   );

   ($status) = ($status =~ /(\d+)/);

   if (defined($errors{$status})) {
           die "ERROR: $errors{$status}\n";
   } else {
           my $content     = $response->content;
           $rss_feed->rss_string($content);
           $rss_feed->xsl_file('rss.xsl');
           $rss_feed->transform;
           print $rss_feed->as_string;
   }
[download]

I'll hit it with benchmark and see if maybe one of the other feching modules can do the same thing faster. Any suggestions on alternate modules that can do the same thing? What I require is:

1. Providing a custom UserAgent string
2. Being able to do HEAD and GET on the URI
3. Having a proper status_line come back for error trapping