  We summarise status and recent results of the European Twisted Mass
collaboration (ETMC). The collaboration has generated gauge configurations for
three different values of the lattice spacing smaller or equal 0.1 fm and
values of the charged pseudo scalar mass as low as 300 MeV with two flavours of
maximally twisted mass quarks. We provide evidence that O(a) improvement works
very well with maximally twisted mass fermions and that also higher order
lattice artifacts appear to be small. The currently only quantity in the light
meson and baryon sector where cut-off effects are visible is the neutral pseudo
scalar meson mass and we present an attempt to understand this from a
theoretical point of view.
  We describe finite size effects and quark mass dependence of the mass and
decay constant of the (charged) pseudo scalar meson with chiral perturbation
theory formulae and our current estimate for the low energy constants l_{3,4}
is l_3=3.44(8)(35) and l_4=4.61(4)(11). Results for the average up-down, the
strange and the charm quark mass and the chiral condensate are also presented.
