How to process content from outside WordPress

Wordpress is used for a blog on a site I’ve been asked to work on. The latest posts need to be pulled onto a static home page. For some reason, Wordpress doesn’t add paragraph tags(?!#). I was using nl2br(), but that messes up lists and other structures. Is there a good way to add them back in when displayed? Is there a way to access the_post() outside the Wordpress directory?

Thank you E

You can use RSS to get latest posts to pull into a static page. You may write your own code or just google embed rss and you will see some widget providers.

Use Google FeedBurner for that RSS thing.