XML with HTML code

I want to have html code in an xml data… whoich i saw that does not work…

for example i have:

<data> text text text <br> text2 text2 </data>

i read it with falsh and it reads the data till it encounters “<” so instead of displaying in flash:

text text text
text2 text2

it just displays: text text text

what can i do so that falsh does not see the < as the ending of the xml data?